I hate to be conventional by climbing on the self-reverential blogging bandwagon, but here’s a good story on weblogs from Canada’s National Post: Bloggers’ emerge from internet underground. It includes the following quote from Dave Winer of Scripting News:

If improved technology created the opportunity for a blog-explosion, it was Sept. 11 that created the desire for one. “A huge burst of growth came out of September 11th,” said Winer from his Silicon Valley office. “When there’s just an incredible amount of information available and people are so hungry for that information, then to have a great distribution system in place is in our national interest. September 11th was an incredible day for amateur journalism.”

I realise that modern technology has changed the scale massively, but it seems to me that ham radio operators were providing such a “distribution system” many years ago and it was equally in the “national interest” even then.