The Celebrity Blogger – Ana Marie Cox: "That whole evening was surreal. This was the first year the political parties allowed bloggers to attend the conventions, and this shot was of me at a party thrown by the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States – my favorite lobby of all time. I was totally reveling in the moment. I was a blogger, and here I was at the New York Yacht Club drinking free booze surrounded by all these well-connected young Republicans. I felt incredibly conspicuous in Levis and this shirt I'd literally cut the sleeves off of 30 minutes before because I'd decided they were too frilly. This was a ridiculous period – there were more stories about bloggers covering the convention than there were things for us to write about. Conventions are such incredibly stage-managed things that reporters are starving for anything they can claim is different from four years ago. So it became 'Bloggers are here!' I'm sure that as soon as they can figure out how to get podcasters on TV, bloggers will disappear."
– Interview by Jeff Howe
Timeline: 2004-05 8.6 million – Number of Americans trading songs online at any given time – double the 2003 figure.
Jan: Blog startup Gawker Media launches third site, Wonkette.
Silicon Bolly: The House of Representatives holds hearings on Indian out�sourcing. More than 3 million domestic IT jobs are predicted to go offshore by 2015.
Aug: Just one more bubble: Google raises $1.7 billion in its IPO.
Oct: Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance reaches a bigger audience online than on TV – and sends Tucker Carlson packing.
Nov: Mother of God: Virgin Mary grilled cheese sells for $28,000 on eBay.
It's baaaack. Next-gen Mozilla browser Firefox launches.
Dec: IBM sells its PC division to Chinese IT power Lenovo.
Jun: Gawker Media launches its 13th site, a gambling blog called Oddjack. Somewhere on the horizon, a blog IPO looms.
Justices 9, Grokster 0: The Supreme Court rules that P2P firms can be sued for encouraging users to swap copyrighted content.
Cox, founding editor of the political blog Wonkette.com, at the New York Yacht Club following the Republican National Convention in September 2004. Chris Buck
10 Years That Changed the World
| Intro
A Decade of Genius and Madness
