The next 9/11 is here. I'm having a very difficult time facing up to the enormity of what happened 365 days ago. I have been busying myself posting unrelated Blogcritics stories knowing full well what is there just outside of my attention.

I was talking to an editor friend in New York this morning who said all of the activity: the scurrying about and speechifying and frenetic commemorating failed dismally to conjure up the reality of what happened one year ago. The only thing that had brought back the feelings and reality of that day for him was being jolted out of bed by a bagpipe band marching down the street outside his window at the alarming hour of 5:30am. That electrifying racket brought back a few memories.

In an effort to force at least some of that reality back into my own mind, let's take a look at the impact 9/11 had on bloggers and bloggers-to-be, creating a new kind of personal journalism and casting their efforts and capabilities into the media spotlight as never before.

"Big-time Journalism will never go away — not should it. But thanks to what we're doing here, it will never be the same. The big crossover will happen when one or more BigPubs starts treating blogs as sources, and not just feature fodder. Sooner or later, they'll have to. We know too damn much, and we're too damn good at telling each other about it."
Doc Searls

Before we consider the galvanizing impact of September 11 on bloggers, let's take a step back to a more innocent time - December 2000 - to consider how blogging was then perceived by one of our premier bloggers, Ken Layne.

In his OJR article "Media Web Logs For Fun and No Profit," Layne begins:

For two weeks, I've been trying to write about the Blogger phenomenon. Make coffee, turn on the computer, check e-mail, stare at Microsoft Word for a while, and look at some Web sites for inspiration.

And then, instead of writing this column, I would add a bunch of nonsense to my Blogger buddy. It's freakin' addictive. So, if you write for a living, don't read this, and don't try the Web-log game. It's too easy, and it will Suck Your Soul Away.

What's most interesting about Layne's summary of the blog metier at that point in time is his casual tone. The river of blog was a meandering, desultory affair at that point. The technical aspects - the ease of operation, Blogger's end-around HTML - were virtually the same as they are now, as was the addictive nature of instant public communication, but the driving impetus, the compulsion to convey something really IMPORTANT wasn't there at the time.

My Blogger experiment was supposed to end with the political conventions. Like many exhausted reporters, I took a long holiday and for a while. But instead of letting the Blogger buddy die, it became a sort of open e-mail to friends and editors. It gets boring, sitting in some foreign Internet cafe and typing the same letter to a dozen people. Much easier to type it once, let Blogger throw it on a Web site, and go back to the beach.
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