On February 15, 2003, I started this blog with a line from Babylon 5:
And so it begins . . .
I realized the other day that I had first written about blogs well over a year ago. In fact, the rise of blogs was one of my 2002 predictions for legal technology in my annual legal tech predictions article. As I was working on updating my web site (https://www.denniskennedy.com), I finally decided that I had to have my own blog. Thanks to people like Jerry Lawson, Sabrina Pacifici, the Support Forum at MovableType.org, it’s finally here.
For trivia buffs, I started the blog not so much to be a blogger, but because it was the easiest way to generate an RSS feed, which is what I cared the most about. I probably became a “blogger” very shortly after I started. It was a great world to be part of in those early days. Sixteen years later, my blog is still rolling along, thanks to so many generous readers.
It can be a little difficult being the parent of a teenage blog. The sixteenth was a little tricky. Not unexpectedly, my blog felt that a new car (not a used one) was the appropriate present. I think I was able to finesse this request by saying that if my blog found a car insurance company that would issue an auto policy for a blog, we’d consider it. So far, so good.
Because I don’t make a fuss about my own birthday (this blog was an early birthday present to me in 2003), I do make a fuss over the blog’s birthday. In fairness, the blog pushes me to do that. And there’s a blogiversary or blawgiversary post for each year. And I usually have offered a small gift to my readers. If you will patiently read to the bottom of this post, you will find a small token of appreciation.
Tom Mighell and I have a running joke that every year for the last few years, we say on our “new year’s tech resolutions” podcast episode each of us would list “reinvigorating my blog.” And we would really mean it this time.
I didn’t do that this year, but I was already starting to feel a positive change in my thinking and my approach to blogging. It’s so much easier to tweet and use other social media than it is to blog regularly. It’s math – much fewer words needed. At the same time, much of what I might have otherwise blogged about was going into our podcast, which, in many ways has become my favorite medium.
It became unclear to me what the blog would be an outlet for. The paradox is that I named this blog DennisKennedy.Blog because everything would be “on topic.”
It’s starting to come back. I’m seeing a path. My panel convergence post on February 13 is one example.
Some of the things that I mentioned in the post yesterday – the shocking disappearance of so many of my published articles due to linkrot and other factors not the least of them – have helped me see where the blog fits into what I want to be writing and what I’m doing.
So, let’s see what happens in 2019 at DennisKennedy.Blog. Thanks for reading over the years and thanks to new readers. Thanks especially to those who found this blog inspiration to start their own blogs. And thanks to all the bloggers who inspired me to get started and to keep it going.
SPECIAL BLOGIVERSARY OFFER:
If you use the code TECHTOOL19 on or before March 31, 2019 on the ABA Store, you will receive a 20% discount on the new edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Enjoy!
All the best to you all. And don’t tip my blog off about the car insurance thing.
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[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
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Now available:
The second edition of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell.