When things started happening on the 7th everything here ground to a standstill. It was impossible to get news through the main sites as they were totally overloaded and barely worked for the next few days.

Although I'm pretty new to blogging I've been getting almost all of my news through feed demon for the last 4 months and so that was where I first turned to see what was happening when the news started to break.

There was hardly anything in the feeds I read so I thought it would be helpful to start collating the information I could find and publishing it in mine. It's what I hoped that others would start to do and would give me and others a better idea of what was happening to my city.

I don't think that it was a great idea though, in fact I can't help feeling that it was a pretty stupid idea. I get most of my news from bloggers and the people I read spend their time passing on news but that's not what I've ever done and Thursday wasn't the right time to start.

There were a lot of normal and innocent people including, as it turns out, a friend of mine (who survived), whose lives were torn apart on Thursday. When things like that happen we all want to help but there's a fine line between wanting to help and just wanting to be involved.

Everyone watched the amateur pictures of people escaping and hurt just like we watch the professional footage. People speak of this as having been one of the first major catastrophies where blogging provided a significant chunk of the news but for the first time too, another observation emerged. People who had been hurt and caught up in the events spoke of their disgust at emerging into the daylight only to find people videoing them on their phones. It wasn't the press that hurt them it was the public.

We live in an uneasy symbiosis with the press. We want to know their news but we seldom want to be their news. Normally we're protected by our own insignificance and the truth that even if people do want to know things about us, the press are quick but not omnipresent. For some, like Hollywood this is not true and often leads to huge sadness.

As things start to change though, as the barriers to publishing fall and the ease of distribution rises we find that we are the press and that the press is everywhere. Readership groups can be as small as one and we each inherit a volatile significance.

When this happens the old addage of 'we only print what people want to read' ceases to be an acceptable excuse. We have to take some responsibility. Can we do that? I'm confident that we will. We are very competant at regulating our societies and we are very capable of adapting.

There will always be people who abuse but as long as there are adequate repercussions they will remain a minority. There will be things we gain and things we lose but ultimately I'm sure that such a system will achieve a beneficial equilibrium. Sadly though, none of this will stop some of the dumber of us tripping up during the transition.