I really do feel like blogging is onto its second wind. The amount of influence you can have on the world by consistently blogging about a subject is just as high today as it was back in the 2000s when blogging first started.
The best time to start a blog may have been twenty years ago, but the second best time to start a blog is today.
Simon Willison, on the 23rd anniversary of his blog
Inkstain turned 22 in March, Simon’s blog is nine months older than mine. I’ve been blogging here continuously the whole time, and I very much agree with Simon on this point.
“By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth, using some of the few currencies it acknowledges (tokens that it has to predict). If you aren’t writing, you’re kind of abdicating your role in the future.
If there are values you have that are not expressed yet in text, and if there are things that you like or want, if they aren’t reflected online, then to the AI they basically don’t exist. Which is dangerously close to won’t exist.”
– Gwern
Good on you for blogging above and beyond the call of duty, sir.
I’ve been at it since … the early Nineties? Whenever AOL started letting users have a rudimentary “homepage,” which was shortly after I quit working for newspapers and took up freelancing for bicycle magazines.
The Wayback Machine shows an early version of a one-lung deal I cobbled together in 1999 with some rudimentary self-taught HTML, PageSpinner, and a small-time Colorado ISP. A few years later I switched to a self-hosted WordPress op’ for seven years before finally dialing it back to a WordPress-dot-com thing.
Unlike you, I have no particular area of expertise. Just 45 years of journalism for newspapers and magazines under my bibs, a few skills picked up along the way, and the bad habit of speaking what remains of my mind.
Official start of Coyote Gulch = March 29, 2023 but I had been dabbling for a year or so.