25 Years of Blogitude

InstaPundit turned 25 on Saturday.

I didn’t mean for it to last this long. When I started InstaPundit, it was just the latest in a series of Internet ventures, ranging from Internet radio stations, and bands, on MP3.com, to RaveRights.com, an electronic music civil-rights site I set up because the DEA was at the time prosecuting raves under the so-called “crack house law,” which criminalizes owning or operating a building for the purpose of taking drugs. (The DEA took the position that no one would go to raves for the music, so they must be there for the drugs.) That site was quickly replaced by the Electronic Music Defense Fund, a nonprofit funded by musician Moby, but I did work with the ACLU on a friend-of-the-court brief in a New Orleans case, where I explained the nature and background and audience of electronic music.

So then I started a blog. I still remember following a link from Slate to Mickey Kaus’s then-new blog Kausfiles. I was struck by how seamless it was – one second you were on an expensive site funded by Microsoft, then with a single click you were on an independent journalism site funded by an individual – and it looked every bit as slick and professional. Still, my RaveRights experience involved web design and maintenance using a program called DreamWeaver, which wasn’t very user-friendly, to put it mildly, and that didn’t make me want to start a new site. (Anyone out there remember DreamWeaver?)

Then Slate was taken in by a minor hoax involving “monkeyfishing,” in which Cajuns allegedly caught wild monkeys living on an island in the Mississippi Delta using baited hooks cast into the trees. That lead to the creation of a short-lived blog of journalistic criticism called Monkeyfishing, and when I followed a link to the blog it was “powered by Blogger” and hosted on Blogger’s own site, Blogspot. An ad invited me to start my own blog in 15 minutes, and that’s literally how long it took to set up the initial version of InstaPundit. Instead of composing stuff in an unfriendly piece of software and then uploading to a server, the Blogger/Blogspot combination meant I could compose and publish on the Web. At the time, in the summer of 2001, that was revolutionary.