Game 2: Who’s Your Daddy?

In Game 2 we will try to build a Blog-Family Tree for those blogs with heritage leading back to TallSkinnykiwi (June 01). Sounds terrible egotistical for me to do this but I am proud of my blog- children, many of whom were up and blogging by the end of 2001:

Jonny Baker

Jordon Cooper already had a website but decided to blog after seeing TSK, as did

Rudy Carrasco,

Alan Creech,

Karen Ward who had me make a banner or two for her original “Deep-Dirt” blog

and other bloggers who are now crusty old blog veterans and have their own blog-children such as

Maggi Dawn (sired by Jonny Baker)

and Maggi and many others (including my flesh-and-blood kids) have inspired another generation of bloggers

who have been fruitful

and have multiplied into thousands of horrible little juvenille MySpace blogs

and who post glibly from their computers and phones without the slightest respect for the dear old html-coded language that we all used to speak

and who are happily ignorant of the good old days when luxuries like comments and tags and archiving and ecto and ompl lists were not yet invented.

[ahhhhh . . the good old days]
and who have no idea as to the identity of their great-great-blog-grandfather

a poor old blogger

tall, skinny and wrinkled

posting senile blog-thoughts from his rocking chair

and thinking fond thoughts about his many blog-descendants.

Touchgraph2Tskfeb2006-1 I know that Google graphs the topography of my blog but it will be a nice gift to build a blog-family tree based on lineage rather than linkage. So if you were either inspired to start a blog after seeing mine, or after being bullied by me to start a blog – or if your blog-father or blog-mother was one of my blog-children, then please leave a comment or send an email [if you’re shy] with the name of your blog, month and year you started, and your blog parent.

And if you dont know if you are related or not, send in the info anyway and we will see what happens when we create the tree.

How do we actually build the tree? Don’t know. Haven’t thought about that. Anyone have a good idea?

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Andrew

Andrew Jones launched his first internet space in 1997 and has been teaching on digital things ever since. He founded The Boaz Project in 2000 and the virtual Suddenly Seminary in 2004.

45 Comments

  • Jude says:

    I was influenced to start my blog after regular reading of Jonny Baker’s blog, and others around me (in Sheffield, UK). Many of those inspired or influenced through Jonny too I expect.

  • Hey Andrew…
    Jonny Baker is my blogging daddy… He inspired me to start. I have to say, though, that you are an inspirational grandpa… Suggest you get a tweed cap for the party… papa!
    Tom

  • rob horton says:

    Andrew,
    Through reading your blog I decided to start a public blog. So you are my public blog daddy. I don’t know if you will want to claim me in the future, but I do really enjoy reading what you are putting out. I am still working hard to sort out this church thing.

  • Ed C says:

    Andrew, I think your blog was the primary inspiration for http://www.inamirrordimly.com. It’s a joint venture though, so maybe we’re only a step-child. I’m not sure who inspired my friend Josh, the other half of inamirrordimly. Yet I can say with confidence that I wouldn’t have thought blogging was a good idea unless I read TSK.
    http://www.inamirrordimly began in February 2005.

  • + Alan says:

    Thanks for the inspiration Pappy! 🙂
    It’s been a cool new world to be a part of – still going strong. Peace to the Tall Skinny one and the blog on which he makes himself known.

  • Simon says:

    It was Pagitt’s blog that inspired me. I suppose that makes me a second ring adoption.

  • DoSi says:

    Sometime last year I read all your posts up to that day to get tuned in to the discussion. This made me want to start blogging and I did this in April 06. Thanx for being a constant inspiration!

  • andrew says:

    you’re very welcome.
    and simon – yes i bugged the Pagitt about blogging and created his first template.
    i think i even made some images of doug and shelley for the front page.
    glad he moved on and got a better looking blog

  • You’re blog really started it all man. I mean come on.

  • andrew says:

    oooh shoot. dang. do i make it sound like that???? i sure hope not.
    actually its a very small corner of the room but its people that i love and people who have enriched my life.
    the bloggers in my family tree are just a few compared to whats out there or others that have devoted themselves to helping other bloggers get off the ground
    kudos to Tim Challies who has also worked hard to help other bloggers get going.
    no . . we are still a minority and the blogs may not always be very interesting or high hitting as fundamentalism or politics (where the big hits lie)
    but hey . . . its family. we are stuck with each other.

  • Jon says:

    I remember stumbling across a couple of blogs and thinking, “A bulletin board? For one person? There’s obviously something I’m not getting.” So I started blogging in order to learn what it was.
    Oh, the blogs I initially puzzled over? I’m pretty sure that would be Jordon and Alan.
    To build the tree, download graphviz and start feeding it data like this:
    digraph TSK
    {
    tallskinnykiwi -> jonnybaker;
    tallskinnykiwi -> jordoncooper;
    tallskinnykiwi -> alancreech;
    tallskinnykiwi -> rudycarrasco;
    tallskinnykiwi -> karenward;
    tallskinnykiwi -> dougpagitt;
    tallskinnykiwi -> robhorton;
    tallskinnykiwi -> inamirrordimly;
    tallskinnykiwi -> dosi;
    jonnybaker -> maggidawn;
    jonnybaker -> judestone;
    jordoncooper -> jonreid;
    alancreech -> jonreid;
    dougpagitt -> simonmeyer;
    }
    Google ‘graphviz dot language’ and you can see how to customize the graph.

  • Jed says:

    Ok Andrew, looks like you get to be great-grandpa to me — I started reading yours before Jon’s, but it was blog one another that got me going for myself. Feeling old yet??
    So I guess that would be:
    jonreid -> jedbrewster

  • andrew jones says:

    thanks Jed
    and in another world, your Mom (Betty Sue Brewster) and Dad have been the grandparents to a whole generation of missional cross-culturally-appropriate life-long learners in the areas of language acquistion and culture appreciation
    and the spins offs from that have been enormous
    maybe one day you could do a LAMP family tree for your parents???????
    and as for Jon Reid . .
    my fondest memory of him was when i screwed up my html one month and created the worst shade of yellow ever seen on the internet
    his response was like . . “ahhhh. it hurts’
    and i have appreciated his geeky advice over the years.

  • Nate Custer says:

    Andrew,
    I would point you to FreeMind a very cool opensource mind mapping tool. I think it can help you great a great looking blog family tree. It would allow you to add little explanations, caveouts, and even color code things.
    The other even more hi-tech way to do this is use FOAF (Friend of a Friend) an XML based markup language and encorage each blog you spawned to upload a FOAF file naming you as their “daddy” and then use FOAF visuallizing tools to make your graph.

  • andrew jones says:

    ahhhhhhhh . . . . thanks
    . . . . . . u geek!!!!!

  • Kathryn says:

    I guess I’m a descendant….via Maggi/Jonny and a very persuasive late night conversation at Greenbelt!
    Hugely aware that I would have abandoned the whole enterprise had I needed to be even slightly techie, and I so value the space to think aloud and to learn from so many different directions.
    Happy Birthday for Saturday,- and thanks for all sorts of inspiration 🙂

  • Pete Lev says:

    Yet another who found your blog through the Mr Baker and was inspired to try my own! Seems to be a pattern for UK people

  • Jon says:

    Here’s the graphviz map thus far…

  • I guess I owe my blog to you, then. And here I’ve been lauding Rudy as the guru for the last year and a half! Thanks for paving the way for the ret of us.

  • rudy says:

    were you blogging in cartagena? that was a week before 9/11

  • Alan Cross says:

    I am DEFINITELY a direct descendent of yours (everyone else seems shy to admit it). I spent 2 years bugging you with comments until I started my own blog on blogger (Nov. 2004) and then moved to typepad (Jan. 2006). You can find me at downshoredrift.com. So, thanks Andrew. It is a blast. I even try to follow your rules for bloggers, though I am nowhere near as creative or as brilliant as you:) Anyway, happy birthday. You continue to rock, and not just in your rocking chair.

  • Mike says:

    Andrew, there’s no doubt, you are my blog-father!!! Thanks for all the inspiration! Reading your blog since summer 2002, I’ve startet my own blog December 2003.
    Mike from Switzerland.

  • andrew says:

    rudy – october 2001 is missing from my archives but i remember posting a few days later, when i got back from berlin
    i did not blog from cartegena. nor malaysia back in 2001.
    jon – much thanks. can you add hyperlinks in that program?

  • Tim says:

    I’ve been reading your blog since early 2003 and in Dec 2003 I started my own. You inspired me to give it a go.

  • Eric says:

    When I found that my sister’s best friend’s cousin was the cousin of my brother’s fiance’s cousin, I started reflecting on how inbred Christian circles can be, and made it a bit of a project to find more of these family links through the church scene.
    I wrote a program to convert a text file describing all the links to a tree diagram, but it ran at random and for a large family tree, would only produce a good-looking tree a low % of the time. So I’ll have to check out those mapping programs mentioned.

  • Mark says:

    TSK,
    I had been reading your blog and Jordan’s for sometime before starting my own last year. So you two were the main inspirations for me to start.

  • Ben Askew says:

    Hey Andrew, started blogging in 2002 after having spent much time on Jonny B’s and on a some of the sheffield sights you’d inspired like moogaloo.
    Happy Birthday for the 3rd

  • Matt Glock says:

    You are my blogfather…
    The kickbacks have been killing me…
    First post was Septermber 16, 2002.
    Thanks for leading the way.

  • hmmm. I was inspired by three bloggers – Ben Askew (who was inspired by), Jonny Baker (who was inspired by), Andrew Jones.
    So I guess you are my dad, my grandad, and my great-grandad; or, I am your child, your grandchild, and your great-grandchild…

  • Jon says:

    Andrew, I agree: The graph would make much more sense with real links. I’ll have to switch to OmniGraffle.
    I wonder if your “first children” might ping their readers for blog-descendants as I did. Without that information, the data is heavily skewed to people who frequent your blog as opposed to theirs.
    “ahhhh. it hurts” Heh. I’d forgotten all about that.

  • I believe you were the one who pushed Scotty into blogdom, and 3 months later I decided to, just for the heck of it. It has helped me a great deal through my journey so far, and I can wait to go back and read from two years ago.
    We had our 24 hour prayer session thingy-do…It was awesome, thanks for the encouragement.

  • Brad Sargent says:

    My virtual lineage traces back primarily to tallskinny and secondarily to shannonhopkins. Both of them(thankfully) pestered me for several years to get my pinkies in gear and get myself onto the net. Andrew cajoled me for years and years to post some writings online, but I just wasn’t ready.
    Finally, my experience at WabiSabi convinced me. I did my first blog entry prep on – oh-so-appropriately – April Fool’s day of 2003, and posted the next day. That was [http://www.beyondposthuman.blogspot.com/].
    After about a year, I shifted to Inknoise after meeting one of their oh-so-cool reps at South By Southwest in Austin, spring 2004. I started posting more articles and details stuff there. You can decide for yourself if that’s been worth anything to the ‘new paradigms’ movement …
    Normally, that’d all be extraneous material, but (as we non-linear/random/layered thinkers usually require), it took a while for the set-up. Andrew Jones has consistently encouraged me since the mid-1990s to get stuff published. Without you, man, I wouldn’t have put thing one on the web.
    Glad to be one of the branchlettes on your blog-log, my decade-long friend, and a most brilliant blogiversary to you!

  • I must be the love child of you and your blogchild Jordon C – enjoy that thought. The two of you were the blogs I read for two or three years before starting my blog two years ago.
    I have at least four of five blog children myself – that I know of – and as far as I know, only one of them reads tsk, so your blog genes are spreading far beyond what you’ll ever realize…
    http://twoandtwomakesfive.blogs.com – Linking to my blog father TSK since birth on June 4, 2004. (Hey – tomorrow’s my blogiversary!)

  • scotty says:

    blogdaddy,
    i first read tsk on march 27, 2003. between then and my first blog post on may 9, 2003 i had filled your email up with enough questions and thoughts for you to request that I start blogging myself.
    i am thankful for the Kingdom-links that have been made via tsk.

  • John Lunt says:

    OK Andrew – I admit it. You’re blog brought me into the emerging conversation – as a matter of fact, I had never really heard about it before.
    I read 24-7 prayer and it impacted me greatly. I was searching google for more on it and came across a post you had about it when you went to one of the meetings. I read your other blogs and I ended up interested.
    So it’s all your fault that I ended up in one of the most confusing but growth directed periods in my life. Earlier this year, I decided to start my own blog. So it’s all your fault. 🙂

  • Liam Byrnes says:

    Hey Andrew,
    Yeah I never even knew what a blog was until I read yours and at first I was confused by the format but after about a year I ended up blogging at blogger that was October 2004 and just under 500 posts later!..here we are.
    Thanks for blogging
    Liam

  • Steve Lewis says:

    Dear Dad,
    I started tracking with your blog in 2001, and started my blog in April 2002. I’d write more loveliness, but I’m already starting to get weepy.
    Peace,
    Steve

  • Jon says:

    The latest graph has hyperlinks and is color-coded by longest (not shortest) path to TSK. So if you were inspired to start blogging because of one of Andrew’s blog-children, I have colored you as a grand-child even if Andrew himself was a direct inspiration.
    The graph is woefully incomplete because we are missing the people inspired by people like Jordon, Alan and Karen.
    I’ll try to keep updating it, but I am going on vacation for a week and am leaving my computer at home. Leave a comment here to get added. And don’t be vague! I want precise lineage. If you have editorial changes, email me directly at tsk.lovechild@mac.com.

  • rick says:

    you started me on it, too, andrew – from a post at relevantmag.com or theooze.com or next-wave-org or whatever.
    father!

  • andrew says:

    jon – appreciate your fine work
    have a great trip and vacation. talk to ya when you get back

  • Andrew B says:

    I think I actually found your blog via Marc van der Woude at http://marcsmessages.typepad.com/
    Does that make you my great grandfather?

  • Jacob says:

    There’s nothing like missing the party. Some problem with our Spanish server yesterday…anyway…
    Dwight Friesen is my blog daddy, but also the first person to point me in your direction!!
    I started with blogger in Aug. 2003

  • Bald Man says:

    I’m one of your grandkids, via Jonny, Jon, and others. Don’t know how much I’ve added, but I’m glad to be a part of the family.

  • cindz says:

    hey andrew! i’m one of the annoying juvenile bloggers that was inspired by you originally (read and weep!!!) but it took blog-pressure from duo to actually get me going (so i guess you can disown me and blame them… ;-P )

  • erika says:

    hey andrew…you are my blog daddy…my first post was may 4, 2003…i have since had to start from scratch twice in two rage-filled internet accidents.
    i began my first blog before i moved to prague because i was not at all interested in sending countless emails to people on how it was going…so…it is to you that i contribute my utter laziness…as well as my internet birth.
    peace…and a big texas hello to your family!

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