In a place where 10 years is a lifetime, the Internet -- and American life generally -- is still feeling the effects of a single Web posting on Jan. 17, 1998.

It got a president impeached, rattled news reporting to its core and sparked awkward school classroom discussions about oral sex. It was the Drudge Report, of course, and the message it posted in ironically old-fashioned telegraph style 10 years ago tomorrow went like this:

NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN X X X X X BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT

Back then, it took four days for the Washington Post and the rest of mainstream media to catch up with Matt Drudge's reports on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

They're still trying.

Mr. Drudge "obviously made an enormous name and built his brand in the earliest years of online news, just because he was one of most prominent folks trying to do journalism and aggregations of journalism, apart from mainstream media," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington, D.C.

Over the decade, readers have been sluicing away from traditional news sources to the blogs, news aggregators and other sites created in Mr. Drudge's wake. Traditional media sources have been forced, in fits and starts, to reinvent themselves and come up with their own quick-turnaround, eye-catching Web methods to compete.

"Since then," Mr. Rainie said, "the rise of the blogosphere and changes in the mainstream media all played into the fact that the Internet has become a more important place for news about all kinds of things, including politics."

The Drudge Report had 2.8 million unique visitors last month, according to Nielsen Online, and is the 52nd highest ranked information/news Web site, according to comScore Media Metrix. Arguably, the very success of the Drudge site's scoops 10 years ago has aided the growth of his competitors, whether they be tiny blogs or big newspaper sites.

The steady adoption of broadband -- now used by more than half of Americans -- has also helped the other political sites and the Internet generally grow exponentially.

Today, almost a quarter of Americans get their presidential campaign news from the Internet, according to a study released last week by the Pew Research Center for the People & The Press, more than double as many as in 2000.

Of that group, more than 50 percent go to three main sites for presidential information -- MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo News -- while 9 percent go to Fox News and 6 percent to The New York Times. Drudge, the report found, was viewed by 3 percent.