Ed Driscoll writes about ten years of Instapundit. So does Bryan Preston.
My recollections are here, at an interview I did with Pundit Press a few weeks ago:
When and why did you start Transterrestrial Musings?
It was October 2001, a few weeks after 911. But it wasn’t a result of 911 — it was a result of something that fortuitously happened a week or two earlier. Glenn Reynolds had started a blog, and a mutual friend of ours (Jim Bennett, who would later write The Anglosphere Challenge) emailed me with a link, writing, “Hey, look what Glenn is doing.”
A few days later, 911 happened, and the rest is history for his blog, but I saw him doing the kind of “letters to the editor” thing without needing an editor, and said to myself, “I could do that, too.” So I found some blog software (Graymatter), installed it on my server, and I was off to the races. Unfortunately, due to some glitches in software changes/updates over the past decade (frightening to think that it’s coming up on both Glenn’s and my tenth bloggiversary), I’ve lost the very earliest posts, but most of it is still there in one form or another. I’ve been on WordPress for the last two or three years after giving up on Moveable Type.
Interestingly, if you look back through his archives, you’ll note that his posts used to be a lot longer when he first started, because he didn’t have as many outlets for his writing. The same has happened to me over the years. I now only write long blog posts when I don’t think I can place them somewhere else where they’ll find a greater, more appropriate audience (e.g., Pajamas Media, Popular Mechanics). I won’t deny that knowing him before he was Instapundit probably helped me get started, because he was probably more willing to link my stuff in the beginning, but he’s always been very much about introducing new voices to the blogosphere, regardless of whether he knew them or not, if he found them.
And still does, I think. I would also note that before there was the blog, I had been on an email list with Glenn and several other libertarian types (including Bennett). Starting the blog was probably just a natural extension of that.
Mr. Simberg, have you noticed any trend of the statists who post comments here getting dumber over the years? I don’t mean the same people getting dumber (you have to be pretty stupid to begin with if you think Big Brother is your best friend), but less-dumb statists being replaced with dumber statists? That seems to be the trend here and other pro-freedom blogs.
It’s increasingly emotional with them. They crave security and the ability to force others to behave the “right” way. It’s not a logical position in the first place.
Since we have a nominally free society and nominally limited government, statists have a hard time when trying to put together logical justifications for their positions within that framework. Because of the near impossibility of making such arguments, we’re beginning to hear much more open statements about government needing to be unlimited. In other words, statists are now more openly authoritarian.
I do appreciate the alternative to more traditional, statist media that is represented by the ‘blogosphere’. And I think the ghosts of Heinlein. Asimov and Clarke would be best served by a permanent outpost on Ceres. To The Belt, young man! Even if I get nouggied for not being a rocket scientist.
The responses get wilder as we become a more and more serious political force. Twenty years ago we were no threat to the agenda. Now we are.
Some of them just aren’t trying any more.
“Bla bla bla racist. Bla bla bla teabaggers. Bla bla bla terrorists.”
Meanwhile, I’m calling them what they really are: economic pedophiles.
Before I join the chorus with the others, I’m feeling a bit of Barbara Eden’s genie not know her birthday vibe here. So I just want to say, My sincere thanks for all the free ice cream Rand. Nobody does it better. May your blog children do it on the frontier.
The dopes just can’t put a reasoning thought together. It’s all band wagon and idiocracy. Even the supposed good guys in the media get caught up like the defense attorney (whose favorite show is, ‘Ow my balls’) in adding to the ignorance frenzy.
“Calling Adults… are there any adults around… we need adults…”
Just because we’re billing our children isn’t a reason to put them in charge.
Yes, thanks Rand for the work you do putting this blog together every day. I haven’t sent a contribution in a while – so many contributions to make, so little cash on hand – but I do regularly click on the Amazon link when I have something to order.