Before the time for thanks moves on, thanks to Shane Hegarty in the Irish Times for mentioning Slugger as one of Ireland’s must read blogs… He calls us “The granddaddy of Northern Ireland’s politics and culture blogs…”
Now I mind the time (as my Uncle Seamus might say) when there was no such partition in the blogoshere… You got your Irish bloggers where you could find them… In my recollection the earliest blog I remember was Sean McCann who started the year before us in 2001…
Damien says he was around from about a year before that, but we must have been on very different beats since I don’t recall seeing his blogging even when we started in June 02…
Bernie was back then blogging at Underway in Ireland, and Karlin who, I think, has been around since Blogging Year Dot… not to mention Paul Dunne’s long defunct and long missed The Shamrockshire Eagle… Oh, and 1169 and Counting…
And there was Frank McGahon‘s lively, combative and always intelligent Libertarian rant space… Smoke Signals rattlebag of stories and ‘stuff’… Stunned who started a few weeks before us… And Gavin a few weeks after…
Apart from those few Irish bloggers most of us drew from a small fund of Brit bloggers and some of the larger store of US bloggers… But we were and remain tiny compared to our counterparts in the States…
You can see how far down the long tail Slugger came (scroll down) when Clay Shirky first wrote about Power Laws in the blogosphere in early 2003…
It’s good to see some of the ‘oul wans’ still going on… And still punching hard… Alongside a steadily powering up Irish and British blogosphere…
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty