Four Years Ago Today
this blog got started. I started blogging to try and counter the already evident (in Dec 2001) anti-war and anti-American bias in the MSM, and to counter the already evident bias in the liberatarian-dominated blogosphere against anyone who claimed any kind of faith. The tendency in those days was to lump conservative, evangelical Christians in with the nutjobs our military was fighting in Afghanistan. I also got into blogging because in those days there were very few bloggers with any military experience, so I thought my short stint in uniform might lend me a useful perspective.
My blogfather is InstaPundit. His good, clear thinking and writing inspired me to get into the game. Though I don’t always agree with him, he’s still arguably the best pure blogger out there. He just has more competition to contend with now than four years ago. Don’t we all.
I called the blog “JunkYardBlog” because a) I figured I would end up kind of watchdogging a few things and biting whoever stepped across the line regardless of who they were and b) because I’m kind of a run of the mill mutt. This blog started out on Blogspot but has been on its own server for a while now, thanks to a very very generous and brilliant friend and webmaster. If I had it to do over again, I would probably call this blog JunkYardBlog but might call it Jackass Penguin or something equally bizarre. Your blog name really can’t be too weird to attract an audience, as long as your writing is decent and you have something original to say. Of if you just know how to link like there’s no tomorrow. Or you find a niche like video blogging or talk about one story in a depth that no one else can touch. Blogging is really what you make of it, and there’s no intrinsic limit to where it can lead. And I should add, there’s no barrier to entry, and there’s no one way to succeed at this. Think you’re funny? Blog and find out. Think you’re smart? Blog and find out. Got Photoshop or graphics skills? You can blog that too.
So anyway, grab some virtual cake and wish this blog a happy birthday. It’s a pre-schooler now.
Please enjoy today’s party entertainment—Fahrenheit 1861.
More birthday entertainment: The Incredulous.
UPDATE: Instalanche! Too bad every day isn’t a blog birthday.
MORE: Since InstaPundit says we’re looking back on four years of blogging, I suppose it’s a good idea to do a little of that. But before doing that, I should probably explain how things happen on this blog. What you see day in and day out here is the final product, but there’s more to making that happen than meets the eye. It’s not just knee jerk reacting to the latest irritant, though it may sometimes look that way. We actually like to make and break news on this blog, and that doesn’t happen without some brainpower applied to looking ahead and taking a broad view of where things are and where they’re likely to go. Chris R. came on board around the time of Jose Padilla’s arrest in summer 2002 and quickly became this blog’s Intelligence and Investigative Chief. He’s an over the horizon kind of thinker, a prolific reader and a brilliant dot-connector. When this blog gets ahead of a story, Chris has usually had a strong hand in that, either in coming up with sources, making connections or reacting to my ideas and flights and letting me know what’s working and what might not be.
Looking around now, the landscape of blogging isn’t the same place it was four years ago. There weren’t any military bloggers. There were only one or two Christian bloggers. Libertarians and code warriors ruled. 9-11 changed all that, and brought people like me into this medium to push back against the media’s misdirections and misbehavior. Now there are millions of blogs and some real groundbreaking work in journalism, business and marketing is being done by bloggers. Blogs snipe at and influence the MSM, and Powerline even brought major MSM figures like Dan Rather down low. Michelle Malkin, journalist and author, has become a blogger’s blogger and a friend of mine, and she has helped legitimize this hobby or addiction or whatever you want to call it. Captain Ed helped bring down the Canadian government. If you’re blogging in the right place at the right time, you can have just as much impact. As I said before, there’s no intrinsic limit to where blogging can take a blogger.
In four years of doing this, we’ve been a part of several big stories on this blog. Jose Padilla and the unraveling of the “official story” of the Oklahoma City bombing was our first big one, and it’s still ongoing. The buses of New Orleans is probably the most important story that originated here, as it refuted in real time the notion that the Katrina disaster was entirely of federal origin, and at a time when the rest of the blogs were focused on charity or other efforts and letting the media and the local failures like Gov. Blanco spin the disaster to their benefit. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on navel gazing or anything; I’m just satisfied that this blog is a little more than a rant room. We hope to find ourselves working similar scoops in the future and we hope you’ll still be here. Without readers and thinkers commenting on what we write, this gets boring pretty fast. We’ve done video ads and photo parodies and had a lot of fun and made the right people mad. And we’ll keep on pushing the Just Google It meme as long as the left keeps lying about the war.
UPDATE: Thanks, Bill! A long, strange trip? Well yeah, but not as strange as the average Andrew Sullivan post.