A year of blogging

So I started blogging a year ago today. At first, it took me awhile to get a template together at my old “blog”:www.politicaltheory.blogspot.com. Then, after a couple days of toying around with links to other blogs, I recall receiving an email from a current member of this blog saying: “I’ve seen you show up in my referrer logs a couple of times now. Time for you to get blogging I’d say!” Well, he’d probably say the same thing today, but, at the time, it was great to have some encouragement. I don’t know about others, but my first ventures out into the blogosphere were certainly apprehensive. Did I really want to be putting my name on this half-baked stuff? Is anyone really going to read this? (Welcome to “Sitemeter”:http://www.sitemeter.com.) Then there was: note to self, this is rather addictive; and, from whence the pressure to post everyday?

I sometimes wonder why people start blogging (and, somewhat relatedly, why the legal blogging community in particular seems overwhelmingly male-dominated). I suppose there’s a wide diversity of reasons. For my own part, I began as a single issue blogger with an inaptly named blog. I took the title “politicaltheory.blogspot” because it was open, and because I’d just finished up a degree in political theory. Seemed like a good way to keep in touch with the field while I was studying law. But my first posts weren’t about political theory at all. They were about why the left doesn’t fund big ideas and the organizations (think-tanks, policy centers, etc.) that help produce and publicize them. I’d been pestering my friends to explain this to me, and, after hearing lots of lame excuses, I put together four posts corresponding to what I thought were four myths about the subject. I argued against the claims that: (i) the left doesn’t have the money (“here”:http://www.politicaltheory.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_politicaltheory_archive.html#91163879); (ii) the left should spend its money helping people, not funding academics to think about ideas (“here”:http://www.politicaltheory.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_politicaltheory_archive.html#91190995); (iii) the left has taken over elite American universities, so it doesn’t need think-tanks (“here”:http://www.politicaltheory.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_politicaltheory_archive.html#91233603), a claim oddly aligned with some of the things “Edward Feser”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/022004C.html has been saying; and, lastly, (iv) that big ideas are needed to get funding, not the other way around (“here”:http://www.politicaltheory.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_politicaltheory_archive.html#91293057).

In the fall of last year, months after I’d written those posts, there was some talk (e.g., “here”:http://www.hillnews.com/news/060403/tank.aspx and “here”:http://blogs.onenw.org/jon/archives/000901.html) about the formation of a liberal think-tank to counterbalance the influence of AEI, the Heritage Foundation, Cato and the like. And, indeed, there is now a “Center for American Progress”:http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=8473 (CAP) run by John Podesta, formerly Clinton’s Chief of Staff, though I’ve heard almost nothing about it. Maybe it’s still too early for them. Either way, I think what I said a year ago holds true. There’s still a long way to go.

This would probably be a good occasion for a more elaborate retrospective. But at the risk of sentimentalism, I’ll just say that I’m glad to have stumbled into the blogosphere and hope not to stumble out of it anytime soon.