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Who Was the First Legal Blogger?
Howard Bashman at How Appealing points to Saturday's Wall Street Journal article noting the 10th anniversary of the birth of blogging:
"We are approaching a decade since the first blogger -- regarded by many to be Jorn Barger -- began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary. On Dec. 23, 1997, on his site, Robot Wisdom, Mr. Barger wrote: 'I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis,' and the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as the primordial root of the word 'weblog.'"
But WSJ writer Tunku Varadarajan is quick to add that the dating of the first blog and the naming of the first blogger "are imperfect exercises."
So too with the first lawyer blog. No one seems quite able to identify the first legal blogger. Just a month ago, in writing Blawg Review No. 111, Bill Gratsch admitted that he did not who was first, but that when he compiled his first Blawg directory in January 2003, he found only 57. I launched my LawSites blog in November 2002, and there were already a number of legal blogs underway. In fact, I wrote a two-part column in December 2002 and January 2003 rounding up 62 of the "blawgs" then being written. The aforementioned Bashman was on that list, as were several other bloggers still at it today: Bag and Baggage, DeLawOffice.com, Ernie the Attorney, HIPAA blog, Howling Point, Inter Alia, Jottings By An Employer's Lawyer, Jurist, Lex Communis, Mad Kane, Ninomania, Rory Perry's Weblog, SCOTUSblog, Sneaking Suspicions, TalkLeft, The Buck Stops Here, The Dark Goddess of Replevin Speaks, The Shout, The Talking Dog, Tins, Trademark Blog, Votelaw and West Virginia Legal Weblog.
But who was the first legal blogger? I snooped around the archives of some of the longest-running legal bloggers that I know of. Here are the birthdates I found, from youngest to oldest:
- SCOTUSblog, Oct. 1, 2002.
- Inter Alia started on Aug. 18, 2002.
- Jottings by an Employer's Lawyer, July 17, 2002.
- TalkLeft, June 2002.
- The Trademark Blog, May 18, 2002.
- The Volokh Conspiracy appears to start on April 10, 2002.
- The Shout, March 10, 2002.
- Ernie the Attorney's first post was March 2, 2002.
- Bag and Baggage launched on Nov. 28, 2001.
- Rick Klau's first was, of all dates, Sept. 11, 2001.
- Instapundit's archives start on Aug. 8, 2001.
- Overlawyered launched on July 1, 1999.
So it would appear that the prize for oldest legal blog goes to Overlawyered.
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on July 16, 2007 at 01:58 PM | Permalink
| Comments (14)
Comments
Wasn’t Carolyn’s blog “My Shingle” one of the if not the first?
Posted by: Grant Griffiths | Jul 16, 2007 3:25:34 PM
Thanks for the mention! I launched MadKane.com on March 31, 1999, as Alexa.com will attest, and it included some legal humor right from the beginning. Of course it wasn't a blog way back then. :)
Posted by: Mad Kane | Jul 16, 2007 3:53:15 PM
MyShingle went live in December 2002. I had actually been developing the site since the spring of 2002, but was using Slashcode which took me several months to master and manipulate to get the site just right.
Posted by: Carolyn Elefant | Jul 16, 2007 4:43:31 PM
Sabrina Pacifici's BeSpacific blog was one of the earliest legal blogs I read. Her archives go back to April 2002. It was certainly one of the most influential of the early legal blogs and set a high standard for professionalism.
Posted by: Dennis Kennedy | Jul 16, 2007 9:10:53 PM
Congrats to all the early blog-dopters! I started reading an number of these when I joining the blogging crowd in 2004.
Wondering whether any state (other than West Virginia) can claim more than two on your initial list of 62.
Posted by: Bob Coffield | Jul 17, 2007 2:10:31 PM
Thanks for the mention; "the talking dog" first posted on September 18, 2001, making me fourth oldest on your list, and as far as I know, still the oldest "liberal" (and a paleo-liberal at that!) Though I am an attorney and do discuss matters legal (or in the case of our federal government these days, extra-legal if not outright lawless), I don't really consider TTD strictly a "blawg".
Frankly, I take serious issue with the WSJ's contentions, insofar as the term "blog" really did not come into widespread usage until near the end of 2001 and beginning of 2002, and took off with the widespread advent of Blogspot, and with the events of 9-11 as the major social catalyst.
Individuals with appropriate technical moxie could have put up personal web-sites earlier than 1997, and frequently did.
(Not that anyone could necessarily find them in the pre-Google era.)
Posted by: the talking dog | Jul 18, 2007 7:31:50 AM
Robert, thanks for the mention of Votelaw. Votelaw opened on 4 July 2002, which is not the oldest, but I still proud to be in your 24 "oldest and still publishing" group.
Ed
Posted by: Ed Still | Jul 18, 2007 6:35:28 PM
I did not mean to suggest that the bulleted list of 12 blogs represents the first 12 blogs. The only first I was asserting was Overlawyered as the first. The others were blogs that I knew existed then and checked their launch dates. There may have been others that launched during that time that I did not mention.
Posted by: Bob Ambrogi | Jul 21, 2007 2:31:40 PM
Tech Law Advisor began as an updated website page in 2002 and then as a full out blog on August 15, 2002 just days before inter-alia and still operates by tagging the web since Blawg Review #79.
Posted by: Kevin | Jul 23, 2007 8:11:12 AM
Right, slashcode was a tedious stuff to get along with.
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Posted by: Simone Cleveland | Dec 18, 2007 10:27:59 AM
Here is a guy who really is probably one of the first blogers:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/debber
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