Dan Drezner is moving from blogging daily to column-ing weekly at Foreignpolicy.com. This is a noteworthy event in the blogosphere as Dan was one of the very first IR scholars to blog. As such, he was a role model that we all followed/ripped off. He was generous with his advice when I asked him about blogging, and his blog was the one that shaped my imagination for what I would do here. Do not blame him, of course, for all of the tangents and such here. But whatever I do well here does owe quite a bit to Dan as I probably would never have started without his pioneering effort. And I would have far less traffic. In my first few years of blogging, whenever Dan would link to my blog, my hits would increase by an order of magnitude or two. So, he definitely helped to get my stuff more exposure as he did for other new bloggers.
More than a few posts here have been direct responses to what Dan wrote on his blog. The good news is that Dan is not going away. I fully expect him to remain quite active on twitter (where he inspired posts like this), and his weekly columns will continue to provide some conversation-worthy stuff. But I will miss his daily stuff despite the fact that my first reaction to his posts were often "damn, I wish I had done that first" or "damn, I wish I have written this."
Again, Dan is not dead, so this is not a eulogy. Instead, it is simply recognition that his efforts have shaped the second and third generations of IR bloggers. The IR blogosphere will bear his stamp long into the future (until either the zombies or machines end it all).
And I have a sneaky suspicion that the move from blogger to columnist might just mean something like this:
Next beer, Dan, is on me.
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