Let me begin this by saying that I'm not exactly sure if the title of this page is a good one. Let me continue by explaining why I chose it.
I recently (as in a few minutes ago) read Meg's article, What We're Doing When We Blog. It's an excellent article, discussing blogging and what it means and looking at the actual way we do it.
A weblog is a series of posts that are updated frequently (that's my definition; read Meg's article for a more thorough one). Now back in the day (don't forget: I'm not that old, so we can't go back too far) a homepage used to be a page that someone made to express their dislikes and likes, and to publish themselves. Maybe you posted frequent update, like a "blog" and maybe you didn't. In any case, it was yours to discuss whatever you liked however you wanted. For people who posted frequently, technology was developed in order to facilitate their work. Content management systems were developed as well as personal publishing tools. The word blog, derived from weblog, was created to describe frequently updated homepages. So what's the big deal? The first comment after Meg's article seemed a little hostile to me. The writer, richard of bennett.com, claimed that blogs were a solution in search of a problem, and that 9-11 helped them find their reason for being. I think without 9-11, web logging would have found many important uses including technical support, sharing information between employees on corporate intranets, etc.
I don't know. I don't think I'm making much sense anymore. What I do know is that when a group of people, however small, is connected to another group of people, and so on and so on, like the numerous webloggers of the world are, they form a powerful network. Information is shared, spread, thought about, and commented on in a way that never was possible before. Google-bombing is a perfect example of this phenomenon. What a wonderful world.