According to the BBC, today is the tenth anniversary of the blog.
Plenty of people will quibble with the details, but supposedly December 17, 1997 was the date on which someone first used the term “web log” to describe this particular format for a web site.
So what? Does that particular milestone have any real significance?
After all, in the past decade, blogs have become just one part of the rapidly growing read/write web mix.
It’s a pretty big piece of the picture, of course, but the concept has become somewhat blurred over the years, overlapping with many of the other options for communicating on the web.
Blogs, podcasts, wikis, twitter, social networks, tagging, and all the rest overlap and make it hard, not to mention irrelevant, to tell the difference.
However, what you call a web site (along with when it was named) really doesn’t matter.
What’s important is that the ability for anyone to contribute to the online conversation continues to expand.