To state the obvious: I have been following blogs for much longer than I’ve had one. A version of what now goes under “Infinite Regress” first started in October 2010, shortly after I moved to the US. Most of it was in Serbian and now available elsewhere but in 2012 I started blogging in English and, well, here we are.
There is only a handful of blogs which I have been following from before that time. The list does not include Marginal Revolution, which I didn’t know about until around 2015, when a hematology attending at NHLBI mentioned it during rounds. [Note: Here is the too much information part, and not particularly relevant to the topic at hand: the attending was Neal Young, who also introduced me to Edward Tufte; it was during the post-Tuesday clinic roundup of patients with aplastic anemia, which were always fun; and it was him showing a video of a bear which Tyler Cowen linked to the day before. Why I can remember those facts but not to pick up ricotta cheese at the store as instructed to by my wife is one of those small mysteries of life. I do also remember being somewhat surprised that the super-smart and erudite Young was impressed by a stupid bear video. ] Andrew Gelman’s “Statistical Modeling…” also wouldn’t make the cut: even though he started blogging in 2004, around the time I discovered Bloglines, I wouldn’t become a subscriber until some time during covid lockdowns during a brief period when I thought I had enough time to read much more than I actually could and ultimately and inevitably overcommitted. Yet I try to model their regularity (consciously) and irreverence (not as consciously, more as a permission), if not Cowen’s positions as of late.
Then there are the blogs which are now dead, defunct, or a shadow of themselves. Many of those productivity-adjacent. Stuff like Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Kevin MD. These I couldn’t say were explicit current influences in format or style, but I do still have a GTD and a medicine tag and I update both fairly frequently.
There are only three blogs I can think of that I have been following pre-blogging and still do, with some interruptions in between. Two of them should not be a surprise to even a casual recent reader: John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and Dave Winer’s Scripting News. [Note: I fought hard against finshing the title of this post with a (the last one may surpirse you) because this is one of those cases where the clickbaity headline may actually have fit. ] The third, though, fell off my radar during the last great feed reader reshuffle as it has several more times over the last 22 or so years I have been a not-so-faithful follower: Dubious Quality by Bill Harris, which has gone from being predominantly about gaming to game developing to, well, something that is less focused than even what you are reading here so I would not exaggerate if I called DQ the ur-influence of “Infinite Regress”.
And a few decades before @jtr’s push to write more emails I was a fairly regular emailer to Harris. In fact, my very first email to him, my Gmail archive tells me, was dated August 24, 2004 and had the subject line of “RSS feed, please”. I haven’t changed much, have I?