Blogs are ten years old

The blog is now ten years old! Not this one you understand but the weblog itself as an online journal, with the first one created on December 17, 1997 by Jorn Barger through his Robot Wisdom web page.
A decade on and Technorati reports it is tracking more than 70 million web logs – which is one of the reasons why we started Fuelmyblog, the social network for bloggers. While many people maintained regular journals or diaries before the word was coined, 1997 marked the point when they started to become a particular online pursuit.
In 1999 the phenomenon took off as easy to use tools – like Wordpress and Blogger - started to appear which made it much easier to write and maintain these sorts of websites. Also in 1999 the word “blog” was coined as a shortened form of the original term.
Nowadays, blogs almost look old hat. Especially with the rise and rise of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. However, as a means for individuals to talk to the world they remain a very potent tool. Not least in the world of public relations, our main job, and we are increasingly seeing clients adopt the blog as an adjunct to their corporate websites.
But will they ever become part of the mainstream communications mix for organizations? I am not sure.