My longtime heart friend Denise Howell was interviewed by Rob La Gatta on Kevin O'Keefe's Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

Rob La Gatta: An old post Kevin wrote says that you've been blogging since 2001. Is this accurate? If so, what first piqued your interest and made you get involved with blogs so early in the game?

Denise Howell: It's accurate, and it actually was a game that got me blogging. I had read The Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, and it resonated with me about individuals and business more than anything I'd studied in college or law school. After that I kept up with the writing, thinking, and online doings of three of its co-authors who were early bloggers.

One of them, Christopher Locke, was writing an article for the Guardian about weblogs. He exhorted the readers of his e-zine (about 5,000 folks) to start blogs and link to him, so (1) he could have something to write about, and (2) his standings in "Daypop" (a Technorati precursor) would theoretically go through the roof. I took the bait over the Thanksgiving weekend and became a blogger in the process.

The point was to play around with the technology (which was free and easy), and the network effects of using it (which were fun and ultimately quite powerful on a number of levels). Many of the folks who participated in Locke's "article research" are still blogging away, and are some of the most thoughtful and insightful folks I've come to know.

This tiny photo is the first I ever saw of Denise. It was on her profile page at some x-random law firm she used to work for way back then. There's a more recent shot accompanying the full interview -- plus one here in this recent ABA Journal article. And this is the original EGR send she's referring to above. I never did write the article for the Guardian back in 2001, thinking I had already missed the window on the big news about blogging. Right.