It's My Blogiversary

It was 13 years ago today that I started my first little blog, JunkYardBlog. It was a hobby then, a sketch pad, and a way to get thoughts and ideas about the new war out of my head and channeled toward something hopeful and hopefully productive.

Glenn Reynolds was my inspiration. The Blogfather still is. His Instapundit site was the first blog I ever read, and his way of connecting the world in real time as we all staggered and stood after 9-11 was unique and incredible. He ran rings around the mainstream media, now the legacy media really, and still does. His and other blogs are testament to the truth embedded in Serenity: You can’t stop the signal. Drudge, another inspiration for me to start blogging, is testament to that every single day.

Blogging has taken me to some amazing places — from Blogspot to Movable Type to WordPress, producing Vent and blogging at Hot Air alongside Allahpundit, a trip to Baghdad, running around CPAC as Michelle Malkin’s lone entourage, producing the Laura Ingraham Show, and PJM and PJTV and this Tatler, which has been my home for four years now. I’ve made a huge number of friends over the years too.

Blogging has changed quite a bit over 13 years. When it first began, in the wake of 9-11 for political blogging, you could actually have an exchange of ideas from right to left and back and forth. There was actual discussion and reality usually mattered more than spin. Now it’s perpetual trench warfare and too many calls for getting people fired for disagreeing with the current and always morphing diktats of the speech police. But along with that, the right has a whole vibrant online media now that did’t exist before. PJM/PJTV are a huge and vital part of that. It’s a different media world now than it was before 9-11, better from the perspective of breaking the left’s stranglehold on what is and is not a story. Obama’s FCC and net neutrality move may curb that if they’re allowed to proceed. He has two years left to build his “legacy.”

I’d just like to thank everyone here at PJM for placing their faith in me, I hope I’ve repaid it. I’d also like to thank you for reading my scribbles across these years.

Now, who was supposed to bring the cake?