Monday, November 18, 2013

Blogiversary

Take my love.
Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care,
I'm still free.
You can't take the sky from me.
(Ballad of Serenity)

The first post on this blog (then called "Black Lamb & Gray Falcon") appeared on November 18, 2004. Has it really been that long? Time flies, when you're having fun.

I've blogged at Antiwar.com prior to that, and have been writing for a lot longer - since 1999, to be precise - but always as a guest. Falcon was the first Web location truly my own.

By my count, there have been 520 posts here prior to this one. Back in 2004, I could give my full attention to columns (then still called "Balkan Express", now "Moments of Transition"). Things that didn't fit there, found a home here. Then in March 2005, I launched Falcon's Serbian sibling, which has flown higher and farther yet.

Designs, templates, links and fonts have changed, but the substance has remained consistent. More than the posting schedule, anyway. I won't apologize for it, though: throughout, my guiding notion has been that an essay has to be done right, or not at all. Even if quantity has a quality all its own.

It has been an amazing journey. The blog has made a difference right from the start and continues to attract both fans and haters, legitimate comments as well as trolls. And that's the thing: before the internet, the legacy media were the only game in town. Today, everyone has a soapbox. Sure, this includes the trolls, the sock-puppets and the mainstream propaganda machine - but at least they are now on equal footing with the rest of us. I'll take that over the old order, any day.

In the coming days, I may clean up some tags, sort the links, and tweak the template a bit. Those are all details, though. What matters most are the articles. And they will keep coming, because that's always been Falcon's mission.

Keep flying.

2 comments:

Aleks said...

Congrats GF. I know what it was like. The way Serbs and supporters used the internet against the NATO propaganda in 1999 with some successes.

Some of us have been in it from the beginning in 1990, trying to inform the powers that be about Izetbegovic's past (and his Islamic Declaration) and Tudjman's (Wastelands..).

It was a free-for-all, minor and ignorant historians and journalists jumping in to the SFRY crisis as a means to promote themselves as experts and somebodies. Old pros like David Binder for the NYT sidelines. A portend of things to come...

Still, the pendulum always swings back sooner or later.

CubuCoko said...

Thank you.

I can't really say I was there quite at the dawn of the Internet age, but certainly early enough in the morning. Which is sort of funny because I'm not a morning person...