Read/WriteWeb is growing. Last month was a record month in traffic, by a long shot. And after over 4 years of blogging, last month was also the first month I've managed to earn enough from R/WW to 'pay' for the time I spend writing and editing it. So R/WW is now a professional publication in that sense, although I prefer to think it always has been in terms of how much work has gone into it! :-) My commitment going forward is to build R/WW into the resource for Next Generation Web Technology analysis and news.

I have two groups of people I want to provide a shout-out to. Thank you Read/WriteWeb's initial sponsors (in order of arrival here):

• Atlassian is from my part of the world and they provide innovative enterprise software solutions, so they're a perfect fit for R/WW. And because they were first on board as a R/WW sponsor, they got the top banner spot ;-)
• Zoho is another very innovative Enterprise company and they are building one of my favorite product types - a Web Office.
• Flock is developing a social web browser and they are definitely one of the most innovative browsers around right now.
• Pageflakes is one of my favorite types of applications - a personalized start page. There's so much creativity in this space and with 100 widgets and counting, Pageflakes is one of the very best and most productive.
• Text Link Ads creates simple text ads which drive targeted traffic and grow your search engine rankings. Go check them out if you're a blogger wanting to make money.

Thanks also to FM Publishing, who have been a great help. It's important to note that all of these sponsors allow me to devote more time to R/WW, which means I can continue to grow the site and provide even more quality content.

Also a huge thanks to the guest contributers R/WW has had over the past few months, who have all helped to make R/WW what it is today. While I don't (yet?) earn anywhere enough to pay them for their troubles, it's my aim to make sure it's a win-win for them in terms of exposure. So thank you Alex Iskold, Ebrahim Ezzy, Steve O'Hear, Ken Yarmosh, Ryan Stewart, Ajit Jaokar - who have all at some stage or another this year contributed to Read/WriteWeb.