Businesspundit launched on March 12, 2003. Some would say that the business blogosphere was born. Others would say I wasn't reallyt the first. It depends. Actually, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that the business blogosphere has been a disappointment. Here's a first hand account of what happened, along with some meaningless speculation about why. This post was in part inspired by Joseph Rago's Blog Mob editorial today in the Wall Street Journal. Joseph has nailed the blogosphere when he says:
Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses.
In 2002, I began reading Instapundit. How cool it was. Here was a guy – a non-journalist, broadcasting his thoughts on the web. I loved it. I soon found others, like Scrappleface and the now defunct Rachel Lucas. It was all very refreshing.
There were several people that blogged about business, but most of them blogged about lots of other things too. My guess is that Seth Godin was really the first business blogger. Economics bloggers were plentiful. Some other bloggers, like David Foster were around and were writing about business and many other things, but I think I may have been the first average joe writing only about business. I did it because Instapundit wouldn't blog most of my articles. I would send him stuff – interesting things about business – and they wouldn't get published. I decided I might as well publish them myself. I was just a digital design engineer at the time, but I was a voracious reader of business press, so I launched Businesspundit as a blog that would point you to interesting business stories around the web. It was a lot of fun.
I don't know how the initial readers came. But Jay and Jonathan were readers from the beginning. There was a political science professor and blogger named John Lemon, who eventually gave up blogging. And there was a frequent commentor named Brother Hezekiah, who seems to have vanished around early 2005. Todd Sattersten, who now blogs here, and Jeremy Wright were very early on the scene too. By "scene" I mean average people writing about business. We had this crazy idea – the idea that you didn't have to be Jack Welch to contribute something to the discussion. Real people have good experiences. That's what I thought.
By the summer of '03 there were a handful of business bloggers. A Professor of Entrepreneurship, Jeff Cornwall had joined the discussion, along with a few other bloggers and Fast Company magazine decide to start blogging, which we all felt gave credibility to the medium. It was a fun time and we all felt like we were doing something cool and unique. I traded lots of emails with the aforementioned bloggers, and people like Steve Bainbridge, Jennifer Rice, and Jon Strande. It was easy to keep up wtih what everyone was writing, and we carried on lots of conversations between our blogs, linking each other's posts and commenting on issues. It is what the blogosphere was meant for, but it only lasted a few months.
The business blogsphere grew quickly, and soon I couldn't keep up. That's really what inspired the Carnival of the Capitliasts. It was an attempt by Jay and I to make sure we didn't miss anything good. But already things were changing.
It became obvious to me that the blogosphere was segmented. I followed links to links to links and ended up on some business blog I never heard of, but that had been around since 2001.
