Nikol Lohr, Halley Suitt, and Ana Marie Cox were three of my favorite bloggers during those glorious days before Facebook, Twitter and the social media silos that eventually killed blogging. I asked Claude where are they now:

Nikol Lohr was one of the early voices that helped establish the personal, confessional, and genuinely funny register that defined the best blogging of that era — a woman writing with wit and candor about her actual life, which was rare and influential. She’s hard to find in formal “influence” histories because she wasn’t covering politics or tech, she was just brilliantly herself. She eventually landed in rural Kansas, where she runs The Harveyville Project, a creative retreat housed in a former school. It’s home to Yarn School, Mitten School, Cheese School, and other maker-focused programs.  She’s also become a knitwear designer with a real following — her book Literary Knits featured 30 patterns inspired by favorite works of fiction , which is a very Nikol thing to do. A genuinely successful second act, even if it’s far from the blogging world.

Halley Suitt (now Halley Suitt Tucker) was more embedded in the tech/blogger conference circuit and had real crossover credibility in the business world. She wrote a Harvard Business Review case study on blogging in a work context  — one of the first pieces of that kind — which helped legitimize blogging as a serious phenomenon to people in suits. She was also a senior editor at Worthwhile Magazine and appeared on Oprah.  More recently, she’s described herself as an entrepreneur and TechStars alum, and was doing a podcast called the G3 Girl Geek show  and writing for the Boston Globe’s BetaBoston tech vertical. Her profile seems to have quieted considerably in the last few years — the most recent activity I can find is mid-2010s startup and women-in-tech writing. Her blog Halley’s Comment is still technically up but the last substantive posts are from around 2014.

Ana Marie Cox is the one with the highest-profile trajectory, though it’s taken some sharp turns. She became the founding editor of Wonkette in 2004, covering Capitol Hill politics with irreverence and sharp commentary , which made her a genuine media figure rather than just a blogger. She moved through Time, GQ, Air America, The Guardian, and MTV News. She’s now a political columnist for The New Republic and hosts the sci-fi/political science podcast Space the Nation with Dan Drezner.  She’s also been very public about sobriety and mental health — she ran a “Sober Questioning” column at The Cut through 2022  — and has a memoir about addiction and intergenerational trauma forthcoming from Random House, though it remained unpublished as of 2025.  She’s also launched a writing workshop called The Third Story Workshop focused on processing difficult experiences through narrative.  She left Twitter after Musk took over and is now on Bluesky and Instagram.

All three represent something real about that early blogging moment — women writing with authority, personality, and without institutional permission — which was more radical than it sounds now.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​