Today, or yesterday, or the day before (however you wish to count it) is the one-year anniversary of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s disappearance from area newsstands and vending boxes and doorsteps. The final edition was edited on 3/16/09 and distributed on 3/17/09.

That made 3/18/09 the first day since the print P-I stopped. That’s why tonight, 3/18/10, is the one-year anniversary of seattlepi.com as a stand-alone Web site. The site’s “producers” (they were careful to avoid Newspaper Guild-recognized job titles) are holding what they bill as an evening of celebration at the Crocodile.

It’ll still seem like a wake to me.

PI.com officials say the site now gets as many “hits” and readers as it did when it had a newspaper feeding it content. They’ve scraped and scrambled to get to that level, using every trick in the old Hearst playbook–canned gossip items, comics, cute animal pictures, fashion pictures, basically all the soft sides of Wm. Randolph Hearst Sr.’s old circulation-building formula. (The hard side of that formula, the scandals and exposés, would require more person-hours of research than the site’s minimal staff can muster.)

Most days, there’s at least one significant local news story on the site. Its sports commentary and tech-biz coverage have steadily improved. Local entertainment coverage disappeared from the site altogether when it went web-only; now at least there’s some.

The site’s design is still too cluttered, but it’s better than it was.

But it’s not the depth-and-breadth news source that the print P-I had been at its best, and that today’s Seattle Times sometimes tries, but usually fails, to be.

To become that, PI.com would need to bulk up from its current 20-person core staff to at least double that.

Even if online advertising rebounds from the current all-around business slump, it’s unlikely to generate enough revenue to support that. (PI.com, from all accounts, is inching toward profitability as is.)

It’ll need some other, or additional, revenue model.  (An iPad paper? A print weekly?)

Until then, or until some other new venture or set of ventures shows up, Seattle’s information landscape will still have a P-I sized hole needing to be filled.