Irish Festival Blog
People are asking me when I started the official blog of the Kansas City Irish Festival. The question has long been answered over in the About Me section, but here’s a slightly longer answer:
I started the blog of the KC Irish Fest in 2003 - the year of the 1st festival, and continued writing it until 2006 during the build up to the 4th festival.
While blogging as a concept was around from the mid-1990s and the word ‘blog’ was in use from 1997 (I had been blogging in a personal capacity from 2000), outside tech circles the word ‘blog’ wasn’t all that widely known in 2003. As a result I softly introduced it to the rest of the organisers of the festival. There were several meetings where I had to explain the term.
At the end of 2004 Merriam-Webster declared ‘blog’ as their word of the year. This was the same year that Google enhanced significantly its service called “Blogger” which it had only bought from Pyra Labs the previous year. These two events persuaded me in 2005 to move the Irish festival blog from its in-house engine onto the Blogger engine and to develop its own brand. It is this move which perhaps has caused some people to mistakenly believe the blog started in 2005 when it actually was running for 2 years at that point.
This blog, IrishKC did a similar move. It currently runs using the WordPress engine but previously ran on the Blogger engine. While the engine (and hosting, and other things in the background) may have changed, the blog continued to be the same blog.
[Note: comments are closed because I have over 73,000 comments awaiting moderation and finding the ones that aren’t spam is far too much work.]
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