An essay so old that it is itself now part of Blog history.

I maintain that I remember seeing personal journal websites waaaay before Blogs-as-internet-filter became popular.

These started back in the days when it was safe for a geek to make a website that detailed daily romantic failures and unrequited loves, because it was highly unlikely that the unrequitedly-loved non-geek would ever see the website. Just like a real, old fashioned schoolgirl diary, except online for all the world to see.

I suspect that the explosion of "journal" blogs mentioned in the above essay was really a case of the Blog party being crashed by lots of people who had already experienced and/or participated in the earlier web-diary craze.

At this point I have not done any research to back this up. Its all in my fuzzy memory.