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September 11th

By razib on September 10, 2009.

I don't usually say much about September 11th because I don't have much original to say. Bu I realized recently that to a great extent September 11th was one of the reasons I got into blogging in the spring of 2002. Obviously I don't talk much about foreign policy or politics in any substantive manner, but in the wake of those events in September the media ecosystem seemed ill-equipped to respond to the changes in the story fast enough, and so non-tech related weblogs arose to fill the vacuum. And arguably that is why you are reading this right now (I actually had a blog for 1 week in the fall of 2001, but I deleted that website after being unsatisfied with what I'd written).

To be fair, I strongly suspect I have a "blogging personality," and would have gotten into this habit at some point. But the blogosphere is characterized by "first mover advantage," so the fact that I started so early has probably resulted in this activity playing a much bigger role in my life than would otherwise be the case.

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"But the blogosphere is characterized by "first mover advantage," so the fact that I started so early has probably resulted in this activity playing a much bigger role in my life than would otherwise be the case."

I'm not sure about that first mover advantage. One person providing the content will repeat himself soon enough. Readers will always look for that new exciting blog. My guess is that any first mover advantage would only last two years.

Yeah, I doubt first mover advantage too -- look how big Matt Yglesias is (... relative to the blog world), and he's new. Or the Huffington Post -- begun in May 2005, several years after blogs were started (and 3 - 4 years is a long time in internet time).

Looking through Wikipedia's "History of blogging timeline," it looks like somewhere around half of the 2000-era ones are still big, and the others aren't. Rather than simply having half as many now as then, new ones came along and took the losers' place.

It's pretty hard to find a real instance of an industry with first mover advantage.