"The blog that, more than any other, inspired you"

You made me blog you, I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it. The Commissar is doing the blogosphere equivalent of DNA testing. It's time to fess up.

"Please don’t name InstaPundit, unless you are on his blogchildren list," writes the totally awesome Commissar of The Politburo Diktat, calling on the ladies and gentlemen who blog to name their pedigree:

I’ve been thinking about making a family tree of the blogosphere.

Bloggers, please leave a comment noting your blogfather, or blogmother, as the case may be. Just one please -- the one blog that, more than any other, inspired you to start blogging. Include your blog-birth-month, the month that you started blogging, if you can. If you are reasonably certain that you have spawned some blog-offspring, mention them, too.

How fun to recall, and how typically human that we have rebelled against the titanic blogfather who spawned us.  As we said in the Commissar's comments:

Even though I’ve dropped him from my blogroll and rarely read him since “the change,” it was definitely Andrew Sullivan before he lost his beloved pooch and went down the rabbit hole.

I started blogging December 12, 2003 with "The tidings that dare not speak their name."

I have one blog daughter, Pat of Pat’s Pond.

Ur bloggers Matt Drudge and Lucianne were our blogging grandparents, of course, way back when.  But it was Andrew that lit our blogging fire. It's wicked fun to keep revisiting The Politburo Diktat to see how our fellow bloggers, as each weighs in, came to mount a soapbox in this cybervillage square.

Comments

[Kitty]

I've read Drudge and Lucianne from the first day I went online. Before then I had my boss print out their "front" pages! But the blog that got me into blogging is Jeremy Lott's little blog called Jeremiads. It was really the first "little blog" I had ever read. I noticed that he used blogger, so I clicked on the icon and the rest if KittyLitter history. I was minimally computer-literate at the time and didn't have the bloggiest idea what I was doing.

[Timmer]

I would say the two that influenced me the most have been Stryker and Michele. Kevin at Wizbang gave me a shot early on but my trying to be political usually ends in some sort of train wreck.

[Timmer]

Okay, html doesn't work. That's Stryker from www.digitalwarfighter.com and Michele from www.asmallvictory.net.

[enrevanche]

The really hysterical thing about my blog-children... I'm slightly to the right of Genghis Khan on most issues, but I have a diverse readership; the two blogs I spawned are both written by devout and unreconstructed liberals. :-)