HISTORY LESSON: Evan Daze sends in this corrective to my primitive history of the blog:

I don't dispute that September 11 was a watershed event
in the world of blogs (and in other things, natch) or that
that generational divide exist or that Instapundit was revolutionary.
The political blogs also seem to have innovated a greater
sense of community, with whole bunches of people writing
on the same topic and linking to each other's items and debating
(or agreeing with) each other, like a good Usenet group; you didn't
see much of that before, but now it's getting pretty common
across the board. I just blanch at the "blogs before 9/11 were
either all-tech or teenagers writing about daily minutiae" notion
that pops up now and again.

There you go.