This article says that a study found that 8 million Americans have blogs. Yikes. Yet 62% of online users "have no clear idea what a blog is." Hmm.

It's interesting that blogs seem so strange and new. The concept seems so simple and obvious to me, and in fact has been in action since the beginning of the web, starting with one of the very first web sites, Justin's Links from the Underground, by Justin Hall, who I count as a friend (from Cyborganic days).

A blog is simply a public diary. The fact that some have taken this diary form and merged it with the newspaper form, or a couple other basic forms, is not that important. The important idea is that it's a regular place where someone publicly writes stuff, and the cloud of technological tools that surround the blog enable revolutionary ways of connecting and distributing the information in the public diary. That's where it gets really interesting. But the basic idea is still really simple. So it's not the blog itself that is that interesting or new, it's its location on the internet and the infrastructure of technology that supports it.