Glenn Reynolds;

We live today in a post-blogospheric media age. The blogosphere hasn’t disappeared by any means, but it no longer plays the central role that it played from roughly 2002 to 2008. This is partly the result of natural media evolution but also the result of very deliberate action on the part of some big players in government and tech. The blogosphere’s successors, such as Facebook and Twitter, lack its independence, its decentralization, and its free-flowing nature. On the other hand—very much against the wishes of their creators—those entities have nonetheless empowered ordinary citizens to push back against government- and media-initiated disinformation (to the extent that there’s a difference anymore) in a way that remains within the finest tradition of the classical blogosphere.

I had been a regular and prominent commentator on Slate’s then-excellent discussion board, The Fray, for quite some time, and the Slate editors were quick to include InstaPundit in their “Me-Zine Central” directory, at which time I thought I had really made it. I remember by late August I was talking with a colleague about my traffic, at the time around two- to three-hundred visits per day, and we both thought that was a lot. Links from Slate, Virginia Postrel, and James Taranto’s Best of the Web feature at The Wall Street Journal boosted traffic, and by September 10, 2001, I had reached the heady heights of more than 1,500 visits per day. The next day was September 11, 2001, and everything changed.