One of the big buzz terms floating around out there is Web 2.0. I haven’t run across a concrete definition of the concept but it seems to represent the growing number of applications that allow web users (that’s you and me) to rearrange the internet to fit their needs.
Blogging is almost always included as one of the pieces of Web 2.0 but David Weinberger is not so sure it should be. He notes that blogs are just the current version of the personal web pages that "got hundreds of millions of us onto the Web in the first place".
I’m not so sure there were "hundreds of millions" of people with personal web sites in the Web 1.0 days at the end of the last century. But he is right about blogs being a direct descendant of what many of us were trying to do by throwing our personal interests up on the web and seeing who showed up.
What makes blogs different, however, is that just about any non-techie with something to say can create one. Once upon a time we tried teaching teachers how to create class web pages using HTML.
A few were hooked on the process but most quickly lost interest – and with good reason. The building process got in the way of actual communication.
In the end, blogging is just as much as part of Web 2.0 as any of the other pieces usually mentioned, if, for no other reason, due to the ease with which anyone can join the conversation.