Welcome to a special 6th anniversary birthday issue of The Cud!

It's hard to believe that yet another year has flown by in our now over half-a-decade online! As we do every November, our birthday issue contains something of a 'best of' of highlights from the previous 12 months as voted by you, the readers. We've worked hard to continue to live by the challenge we set for ourselves back in Sydney in 2004 to consistently offer 'free-form articles and opinion pieces on subjects from across the spectrum' and engage our readers with the challenge to 'Entertain A New Perspective: Chew The Cud', and we hope that this issue reflects that commitment.

The 2009/2010 period was witness to some real highlights, and penned by some of our most popular and established returning contributors, including Wilfred Finn, Ivan Head and Cameron O'Neill, but we've also been grateful for new additions to The Cud family, in particular Kirsten Moore, Timothy Rich and the prolific author M. Christian, whose well-received 'Welcome To Weirsdville' essays we hope to feature well into the future.

Each year hundreds upon hundreds of media websites fold online, and the struggles of news and commentary-based media sites to succeed are widely known. While marquee-name newspapers across the globe are battling to adapt to a readership that is shifting away from printed media to iPads and Kindle Readers, the voice of a small online magazine like The Cud can easily be drowned out amid the multitude of voices -both good and bad- coming from bloggers, news media and commentary sites as well as established, professional and wholly unknown, amateur authors alike.

Today The Cud enjoys a steady readership based primarily in the United States and Australia that has grown significantly since our launch some years ago. At the same time, we continue to receive supportive feedback and expressions of interest to contribute from across the globe, such is the broad audience reach available online.

That we have managed to see our readership consistently grow with each passing year is perhaps testament to a mere survival of a war of attrition over so many other similar-content websites that have fallen by the way, and yet we can't look past the fact that without strong, informed writing from our contributors at the outset, the entire site would have folded for a lack of audience long ago. Without their enthusiasm and loyalty to the original spirit of our website -to invite and encourage work by individuals from all walks of life whether they be writers or not- we would, frankly, be quite lost!

We're happy to announce that Ben Cattell is the winner of our $100 Amazon gift certificate competition. Ben voted for the March 2010 article 'The Dolenz Encounters'.

Thank you, as we do each year, to everyone who has helped make The Cud become what it is today. We really can't do this without you, and hope to continue as we have for another six years and, with luck, beyond...

Evan Kanarakis
Editor, The Cud