Happy Birthday to us! Here’s how it got started. About a year and a half ago I wrote an email to Sandeep saying we should start a blog. He ignored me and I forgot about it. Then a few months later he wrote back something like
Hey: I’m into the idea of starting a blog as long as I can blog about topics other than economics (and occasionally mention economics!). Interested? They’re hard to sustain on your own unless you have verbal diahorrea and are vain enough to think every stupid thought is worth writing down.
which to me read like a reply to an email I never sent (I forgot I ever sent the first one) so I thought he must have meant to send it to someone else and had sent it to me by mistake. But in fact I had already started “blogging” to myself as a sort of trial run for starting a real blog. I would write a few sentences in an email to myself every day to see if I had enough ideas and the stamina to keep it going. So I thought I would take advantage of Sandeep’s mistake and I wrote back
totally, i was going to ask you. in fact i ahve been planning for a while. i have been writing mini blog posts and saving them so as to have a stockpile before actually starting. i have a few thoughts about format too.
definitely not an economics blog (except when we feel like it.)
most of my stupid thoughts i think are worth writing down.i have even decided on a name for my blog but if you dont like it we could come up with one together.
And so we started thinking of a name. Sandeep had a lot of bad ideas for names
- hodgepodge hedgehog
- platypus
- bacon is a vegetable
- release the gecko
- coordination failure
- reaction function
and he is too much of a philistine to appreciate my ideas for names:
- banana seeds
- vapor mill
- el emenopi’
so we were at an impasse. Somehow we hit upon the name Cheap Talk. Sandeep ran it by some folks at a party and it seemed like a hit. (That name was taken by a then-defunct blog and wordpress does not recycle url’s so we had to morph it into cheeptalk.wordpress.com.)
The first post was February 2, 2009. We didnt publicize the blog widely at first because we wanted to make sure we could keep it up before making a big commitment. It seemed to have some momentum so we went public about a month later. It has been a ton of fun and I am really glad we took the plunge.
7 comments
Comments feed for this article
February 2, 2010 at 9:27 am
Tim
“Verbal diarrhea” = logorrhea. I learned that tidbit on one of the spelling bees a few years back.
February 2, 2010 at 10:25 am
Rajiv Sethi
Jeff and Sandeep, congratulations! Reaction function would have been a good name but too modest for what you guys are doing. You have a mix of analytical clarity and offbeat humor that really appeals to my taste. I have to say, though, that your rational choice approach to torture made me a bit uneasy (not to mention queasy).
I know a bit about blogging stamina (or lack thereof). I started my blog in 2002 and had a total of 13 posts over the first seven years. Then I wrote a piece on the Gates arrest that the New York Times declined to publish, so I decided to bring the blog back to life. Most of us have more ideas than we could possibly turn into research papers – might as well make them available to everyone else…
February 2, 2010 at 1:54 pm
jeff
rajiv, we should have a first draft of the torture paper within a week or so. you’re gonna love it.
February 2, 2010 at 2:35 pm
sandeep
My favorite was reaction function – game theory meets allusion to function of blog being to react to current events. Jeff suggested Cheap Talk and won the coin toss that determined whose list we picked from. I picked Cheap Talk from his list. And it actually fits our random topics better than reaction function so it all ended well.
Also, I agree with Jeff – wait to see our torture paper before dismissing it.
February 2, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Rajiv Sethi
Point taken… I’ll withhold further commentary until I’ve read the torture paper.
By the way, I like “Cheep Talk” (with its ornithological connotations) even better than “Cheap Talk”. I’m surprised you didn’t consider “Babbling Equilibrium”.
February 2, 2010 at 3:55 pm
jeff
My proposed subtitle was “occasionally non-babbling”
February 2, 2010 at 10:26 am
Alicia
Happy Blog 1st Birthday!! Take the chance to smash some cake. For some odd reason turning one and getting married are the only two occasions when smashing cake is deemed socially acceptable. So enjoy it and smash a cake.