Congratulations to Glenn Reynolds, who's celebrating his sixth anniversary on Instapundit. And while he links back today to what he was writing about in August of 2001, his current site lacks one of the most important elements that made his unique prior to 9/11: the Blogger.com button. You can see it here, on this page archived by the Wayback Machine.

When my local neighborhood finally recieved broadband around 1999 or so, I began reading some of the same big boys I knew from my previous dial-up days: Drudge, National Review, Reason, and World Net Daily amongst them. There was also the Brothers Judd, in its pre-blog, book review-dominated early days, which seemed like massive self-publishing project.

Eventually I discovered e-zines, including, I believe Mickey Kaus, maybe Andrew Sullivan, and definitely Virginia Postrel, since Reason, which she was then doing a superb job of editing, frequently promoted her personal Dynamist site. But e-zines seemed like a fair amount of work to me to maintain, based on my HTML skills--or lack thereof--back then: they had to be designed, new pages had to be FTPed up at least daily, lest the site start to develop cobwebs, and the whole thing seemed like the technological equivalent of custom tailoring: a lot of hard work and individual craftsmanship.

I knew there were also blogs, but those seemed like an entirely an entirely different kind of flying altogether, as Ted Striker would say. (Who’s this Shirley he keeps referring to? What's her blog's URL?) Or as I wrote a couple of years ago:

Prior to discovering InstaPundit, rightly or wrongly, I thought of Weblogs as being online diaries for teenagers to describe their latest trip to the shopping mall. It was only because Glenn used Blogger's software at the time that it began to dawn on me that a Weblog could do much more than simply be a daily personal diary for the world to see. I think I had a reaction similar to a young Woody Allen seeing Mort Sahl for the first time, and realizing there was a different form of humor than just one-liners and shtick, or a young musician hearing Charlie Parker and thinking, "Wow--there really is more to jazz than swing...!"

Of course, the dinosaur media had the inverse reaction, but that's not all that surprising. Despite being in the business of reporting news, they're often the last to notice any kind of technological change. Once they do notice, if its one that threatens their livelihood, and especially, if it threatens their status, they'll attack it no end.