Ed Driscoll picks the top ten events that defined the blogosphere in 2004: The Year Of Blogging Dangerously.

1. Ra^therGate: This is the big one Elizabeth! The Bush Air National Guard story was rehashed seemingly endlessly back in February. When it was announced that the low rated mid-week 60 Minutes II would be doing yet another piece on the subject on September 8th, most on the right simply rolled their eyes and said, “again”??

But the night that the story ran, CBS also put online some of the documents that they acquired to try to make their case. Members of the popular Free Republic forum noticed that those documents looked…odd. Like something that was done last week on Microsoft Word rather (excuse the pun) than on the typewriters that a 1972 Texas Air National Guard base would have. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs created a blinking gif showing the CBS document in question flashing in sequence with a version he created in Word. And lots of people simply opened their copies of Word 2000 and tried it for themselves.

The result of all this was that on November 23rd, Dan Rather announced he was retiring in March (ironically from his much more visible nightly news anchor position-not his 60 Minutes II gig that caused all hell to break loose) one year shy of his 25th anniversary as anchorman at CBS.

It wouldn’t have happened without the Blogosphere (pajama-clad or not), which began the year wondering about the biases of the mainstream media, and ended it in a position to supplant them as leading opinion makers.