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January 07, 2005
this blog turns two
(From Wingspread, WI): I first posted on Jan. 8, 2003, so tomorrow will be the second birthday of this blog. I've posted every weekday since then, except when I've been away on vacation with my family. There have been 514 entries, total. I've already told the story of how I started, but in brief: I was asked to moderate an academic panel on "community in cyberspace." The panelists included Eugene Volokh, Glenn Reynolds, Jack Balkin, and Amitai Etzioni. Although I knew about blogging, I didn't know that Reynolds and Volokh had hugely popular blogs--which is why they had been invited for the panel. I hastily wrote introductions based on their university web pages, which only mentioned their scholarly and teaching interests. But the conversation turned to blogging, naturally, and I decided to get into the game. Etzioni and Balkin also started their blogs within a month of that panel.
In the last year, some of my favorite moments were: learning that a college class had been assigned to read my post on what it means to be civic; suddenly getting a fair amount of attention for a mini-essay ("What's wrong with the left, and what to do about it?"); receiving a Christmas card from a reader; and having three academic articles accepted for publication that were entirely composed of assembled blog entries. Speaking of "community in cyberspace," I've also enjoyed my regular commenters and reciprocal visits to their blogs--for instance, Prairie Weather, Brad Rourke, Eli Edwards, In Medias Res, Mike Weiksner, Rick Emrich, Nick Beaudrot, and Anjali Taneja.
Posted by peterlevine at January 7, 2005 08:39 AM
Comments
Congrats on two years! Keep going because your blog is an important place of synthesis.
Posted by: Mica Stark at January 7, 2005 02:04 PM
Peter, as someone you kindly mentioned on your second anniversary, I offer you back a hearty thank you and congratulations. Yours is a voice I turn to regularly for a thoughtful set of questions -- as well as a few answers. I appreciate your synthetic view (I mean that as praise, not criticism) of current affairs.
Happy anniversary!
Posted by: Brad Rourke at January 8, 2005 08:59 PM
To Brad's comments: hear hear!
Happy anniversary and thank you for your always thoughtful, incisive blogging.
Posted by: Eli at January 10, 2005 08:20 PM
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This blog is under attack from comment spammers, who are causing a problem for the server. I believe I can block them by upgrading to a recent version of MoveableType. However, I do not have time to do that until late December. Therefore, I have temporarily disabled comments. Please feel free to email me feedback at plevine@umd.edu.