You are listening to another no fair remembering stuff, the Tuesday edition of the Professional Left Podcast, and available wherever you get your podcasts, and at our website, pro-leftpod.com, where you can also contribute to this podcast.

There's a Patreon button at our website, or you can mail us a letter and or contribution at the Professional Left podcast, P.O. Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791.

And it's not safe for work. In this episode, we talk about a bygone and nearly forgotten age, the rise of the liberal blogs.

Da, da, da, da.

Now, we realize that listening to old people sitting on the porch, talking about the good old

days can be really boring, or come off as some kind of semi-mythical recollections that have

been handed down the generations,

like, say, the legends of Earth that was in Firefly. But in this case, that past isn't bygone

at all. It just seems that way because of the speed with which the immediate past is getting

buried these days. In the story of the early days of liberal political blogging,

it's really important to understand the context in which the story happens.

For example, the first ever blogger is widely believed to be a guy named Justin Hall,

who was a college undergrad in 1994 when he started a site called links.net. And the term blog is

shorthand for weblog, which were originally diaries kept by people who wanted them available and

shareable using the internet. It was a quick, inexpensive way of tossing off thoughts and letting your friends

and colleagues know without clogging their email inboxes. Remember, 1994 was a full decade

before Google released Gmail. And for a long time after that, Gmail was basically a lab experiment

that was available by invitation only.

If people used email at all, it was probably Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail, and or some proprietary system used by their employers at work.

Blogger, the platform that most of us ended up using, was a cool, glitchy little thing

developed by Pira Labs in late 1999. Pira was bought out by Google in 2003, and Blogger got its first

major facelift the next year, just in time for the liberal blogosphere to explode.

...