Thursday, April 12, 2012

Seven Years of Wise Law Blog

Blog years probably should be counted like dog years.

And while I'd be remiss if I didn't note that the seventh anniversary of the commencement of this blog came and went last week, the truth is it seems like it's been much longer than that.

In fact, it's awfully hard to remember life before the blawgosphere.

On April 5, 2005, the day of our first blog post, Paul Martin was still Prime Minister of Canada.  The NHL was in lockout mode and Leafs' playoff drought hadn't even begun.  Gasoline prices were on a rapid, inevitable ascent to a buck a litre (and beyond), but hadn't quite gotten there.  America was unashamedly torturing enemy suspects, and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was still months down the road.

The Web 2.0 revolution was in its infancy.  The phrase "social media" was nowhere to be found in our common lexicon.  Facebook was still restricted to students and would remain so for another eighteen months.  The first proto-tweet was still nearly a year away.  "The cloud" was something to seen only by gazing upward into the deep blue sky.

And the members of Canada's fledgling legal blawgosphere could probably be counted on one hand.  Stan Rule, Connie Crosby, Slaw... Maybe a few others.  Some still here, some long ago departed.

Suffice to say, it was a very different time, not that long ago.

And I write this short post, I notice a few things.  The seven paragraphs above have consumed about 45 minutes of writing, researching and tinkering time.

And boy, do I ever enjoy writing.

I confess - it has been a while since I wrote regular, narrative blog posts.

It was hard not to notice over the last few years that Twitter simply emerged as a more efficient technology than blogging for sharing breaking legal news items  While our ongoing tweets and daily 140 Law posts continue our original mission of spreading such news developments to the profession and the public, I acknowledge that something is definitely missing - the thinking, researching, reasoning, exploring, creating... (and perhaps, the snark).

Hopefully, this year I will write more frequently.  Not promising. Just sayin'.

This blog has delivered many personal highlights over the years, from Steyn wars and Twitter-feuds to LSUC gigs, media moments, OMG! Law Talk, Blawger-meetups and the persisting kindness of the Clawbie powers-that-be.

This continues to be a very happy and rewarding experience.

Many thanks to our readers and contributors over all these years. Hopefully, we'll still be here to do another one of these posts in 2019.

And how old will we be in dog-years then?

Now, I have some work to do.
- Garry J. Wise, Toronto