The news stream of the country just shifted dramatically. I was up late last night, putting on hold an article deadline, unable to take my eyes off CNN–and remembering what it was like to be in D.C. on 9/11, huddled in a hotel watching the news, and then for more than a month afterwards, as we were all additionally terrorized by the anthrax mailings.
Blogging itself was largely born in the wake of 9/11–the fear and the insatiable demand for news and information, combined with the Internet, set the stage. I started blogging shortly afterwards when I and others created Tapped, the blog of the American Prospect magazine.
People will rightly point out that the tech blogosphere was robust well before 9/11. But I think it is valid to assert that the non-tech blogosphere’s coming of age was really 9/11. Many of the prominent bloggers today (Matt Yglesias and Megan McArdle for example) come out of the “warblogger” milieu of that period (whether pro or anti “warblogger”). Myself, I began blogging a few weeks before Chris at Tapped on a pre-GNXP weblog I had for all of two months, from April to May of 2002. At that …