Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

January 22, 2004 is my first bloggiversary!

OK, I was posting some links and comments in my Slashdot journal a bit before that.

What happened a year ago was that I wanted my links to start getting counted by Blogdex. The Republican Astroturf scandal was big in the blogworld, but hadn’t yet been picked up by dead tree newspapers. Paul Boutin of Wired and Slate was blogging the story, but I pictured Blogdex as our ticket to feature treatment from CNN.

I wanted to add one more to the Blogdex-count of people who linked to any Astroturf story, helping to keep it on the front burner until the New York Times woke up and got into the act.

So a year ago, I signed up for weblogger (because that’s where Paul Boutin’s blog was), got a template as much like Paul Boutin’s template as I thought was decent (I changed the color), put up my first post, and registered my blog to be counted by Blogdex…..

At first, my blog was all politics, all the time. In fact, it was all Astroturf stories all the time. But before all my hypothetical readers dropped dead of boredom, I went to Dave Winer’s first Harvard blogging meeting and discovered there was more fun in blogging than getting your links enumerated by Blogdex.

Other big inspirations:

• Jeneane and Kalilily and Blogsisters.
• Getting a sudden boatload of traffic from Russell Crowe fansites after I blogged a gladiator sound effects striptease.
• Halley’s May 10 Boston Blogger Beach party where I met Feedster’s Scott Johnson and we all got sandy after eating fried clams.
• Bloggercon, where I met so many great people, and I want to thank Dave Winer and Harvard for comping me to the first day!
• Getting invited by Scott to start working for Feedster, which I have been loving doing.
• Learning how to use IRC for my new job, and meeting all the wonderful people in #joiito as a result–thanks, Joi!
• Reading a million new blogs and news feeds to pick out Feedster’s Feed of the Day.
• Having Feedster picked as a finalist for the Bloggies! (“Best web application for weblogs”)

Now, if you read my Fable of Three Bloggerconners, you know I don’t make blogging some kind of religion. But I surely wish, for myself and also for anyone who read this far, that next year will be as much fun for all of us as this year’s been for me.