10 Year Anniversary of Blogs: Time Flies When One's Overwhelmed!

A few minutes ago my colleague Jon Gibs forwarded me a BBC article noting that today the "word 'weblog' celebrates the 10th anniversary of it being coined on 17 December 1997."  Unbelievable! Has it really been 10 years?  Now, in fairness, lest anyone be deluded into thinking I was on top of this mega-trend back in 1997, let me admit up front that I just didn't have an early clue about any of this until about five years ago.  And the real tipping point, I will admit, came when I impostered my way into an intimidating (yet unmistakably stimulating) A-List blogger event on November 6th 2004 entitled BloggerCon, organized by the likes of Dave Winer and held at Stanford University. Although I already had a blog dedicated to my Hybrid Car experience (HybridBuzz.com), and our pre-Nielsen company Intelliseek had already created a blog portal known as BlogPulse.com (a perpetual thanks to then-employees Natalie Glance, Matt Hurst, and Sundar Kadayam for pushing us hard in that direction), I learned quickly at this "don't talk unless you have credibility, passion and authority" conference that I was barely scratching the surface of what the blogosphere was all about!  I'm still scratching my head, but I do know this: the blogosphere is at the heart of the unprecedented changes taking place in media and communication today.  Yes, there's hype, and I've written about this plenty, but with the blogs has come an unmistakable, largely bottons-up publishing revolution, and we're continuing to feel their impact across all levels of communication: consumer, corporate, media, and beyond.  The blogophere has also laid tracks and runway for CGM2 (consumer-generated multi-media), social networking on platforms like Facebook, and an unmistakable (and long-overdue) corporate "reset" in thinking about relationship marketing, conversation, consumer relations, and of course -- my favorite topic of all - customer service.  And so yes, a "Ten Year Anniversary" certainly worth celebrating.