20 years of TechnoLlama

On the 20th of October 2024, this blog turned 20 years old. I’ve been both dreading and looking forward to this milestone. On the one hand, this is probably one of the longest single projects I’ve ever undertaken, and it has resulted in a written corpus that I cannot even begin to explore. On the other hand, well, to put it bluntly, once you’ve been doing something for 20 years it means that you’re now officially old.

I never thought when I started this silly idea of making a blog on the old Blogspot platform that I would still be doing this 20 years later. Back then blogging was a big thing, but you also have to consider that this was before the rise of micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, so for the most part we would use it to share news and links. Indeed, my first proper blog post was to announce a lecture from Cory Doctorow at Edinburgh. For the first year, that is precisely how I used the platform—it was mostly links, conference announcements, and news. It was only when I started writing longer pieces that I realised I actually had an audience, particularly as I started using the blog for my main research topics, which at the time were open source licences and Creative Commons.

Whilst Blogspot was a good place to house the blog, the interface became rather constraining, which is why I decided to purchase my own domain name and hosting, and to move the blog in April 2009, not even five years into the experiment. Whilst I still think fondly of those years, to me the Blogger era was mostly short articles and links, and although there were a few longer posts that made a splash, this was still mostly a period of growth and exploration. Moving was a big gamble—would the audience follow me? Would the new website receive as many hits as it used to?

The answer is that the blog thrived. It turns out that I switched just around the golden age of blogging, but social media was already having an effect, and many blogs quite simply disappeared. Yet I persisted—I’m pretty stubborn, to be fair—and I continued writing, even if it was only for myself.

My writing also changed: the articles got longer, the period between each article became longer too, but each blog post was more considered, with more thought going into each one. I would still have shorter posts and announcements, but for the most part, I tried to ensure each topic was one that I felt was worth covering.

By the 10th anniversary the blog had a healthy readership, and I feel like I had hit my groove.

This decade has been a mixed bag. As blogging became less popular in general, readership figures started to drop around 2020, with a few exceptions. Things changed dramatically in 2021 with the advent of NFTs and then with the AI revolution—the blog had found a second lease of life, and my readership numbers exploded. They have remained quite healthy, only affected by periods in which I write less. The algorithm is hungry and must be fed.

So I am still here, 20 years writing on my own. Other blogs have succeeded and thrived by becoming collective endeavours, such as the always excellent IPKat and the amazing Kluwer Copyright Blog, but I’m rather a solitary figure, and I don’t think that I could ever bring anyone else aboard—this only works as my voice, and it’s what makes it different from other much more polished and professional setups.

One thing that I have noticed is that blog posts receive fewer comments nowadays, and I’m not sure if that is my fault, or if people simply feel less inclined to comment.

I’m not sure if I still have the energy to continue, but I have no desire to stop. This blog has become an integral part of my writing process; most of my journal articles start life as a blog post, and it’s useful to see where I hit upon an interesting topic, and where I miss entirely. Nothing is better as a sounding board than having your own sandbox where you can throw ideas into the public domain to see what sticks. Am I mixing my metaphors again?

I can’t promise that I’ll still be here in 20 years’ time, but let’s try to make it to 25. Who knows? That may still work.

Some favourite articles:

• Doctor Who: Partners in Copyright Crime: My most popular post from the Blogger era and one of my most-read papers, this got me cited by celebrities and invited to an ill-fated interview with the BBC.
• Should law enforcement pursue game theft? A fun look at property in virtual spaces, the feedback on this was amazing, even made a couple of virtual friends.
• A beginner’s guide to supporting Costa Rica. This also made the list for my 10th anniversary, and it remains one of the most popular blog posts I’ve ever written, mostly because of Facebook.
• Anonymous and the decline of individualism.This was my favourite post from the first 10 years, and while I think it hasn’t aged as well, I still think that I had some interesting ideas going. I may revisit at some point.
• Can you copyright the Klingon language? A fun blog post in which I had to try to find out how to say copyright in Klingon.
• The curious case of Technoviking: My second-most popular blog post ever (the first one is a debunking of Facebook copypasta in Spanish), this still gets hits almost every day, I guess that it must be ranked quite high on Google.
• Do androids dream of electric copyright? Ownership of Deep Dream images: This is the best example of a blog post that eventually became an article, and my most-read one at that. It starts with a simple question and an exploration of the law, and the rest is history.
• DALL·E goes commercial, but what about copyright? This is another popular blog post, and if I were to make a claim at impact, I heard that this post prompted a change to OpenAI’s terms and conditions (no way to confirm this, just something someone told me). Not like anyone paid me or anything, but it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
• Can copyright teach us anything about NFTs? The first in what would become a long series of articles about NFTs, this was both popular and influenced yet another journal article.
• Time to decolonise the Internet: One of my favourite articles from the last 5 years, and one that I still believe strongly in.
• And my favourite blog post from the last 20 years is “Asking whether AI outputs are art is asking the wrong question“. This hasn’t been very popular, but it was a personal exploration of what I think art is.

And once more, thank you, dear reader, for still being here after all these years. Whilst I mostly write for myself, it is still lovely to know that there’s an audience out there. You make all of the effort worth it, and from time to time it’s wonderful to go to a conference and have someone tell me that they’re a fan of the blog, or even better, when someone meets me and they initially don’t make the connection that I’m TechnoLlama.

But my relationship with my alter ego is a subject for a future blog post.

Cheers!