Way back in the dark ages when this blog was born, the internet was really this outside force, and not the central nervous system for news and political discourse like it is now. There were some online publications such as Slate and Salon, traditional newspapers all were online, and of course America's Assignment Editor Matt Drudge, but the internet was much more of a collection of isolated islands back then, not nearly as connected up somehow. Ranting away on your blog, or on your pre-blog site, was a bit more like shouting into the void. It was really hard to lift an idea or fact up into the general discourse, you know, like the fact that the Iraq war was the stupidest fucking idea ever.
