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Suw Charman of Strange Attractor has a go at exploding the blogs-are-diaries myth.

At the root of this problem is the confusion between the blog tool and the blog content. A blog is no more a diary than an empty notebook is a diary. Blogs become a diary when people use them to publish diary entries in the same way that a notebook becomes a diary when you write a diary entry in it.

But an empty notebook can also be a sketch book, a novel, an exercise book, a dictionary, or an infinite variety of other things, depending entirely on content. Equally, a blog can also be a tool for disseminating important news, or a project log, or a team building tool, or a marketing tool, or whatever its user chooses to make it.

She mentions conversations with non-bloggers from IT and other industries that either don’t ‘get’ blogs or find the word itself an obstacle to the potential of blogs in business that sound only too familiar. Sigh. Yes, ‘blog’ is a funny word. Just like ‘Google’… which, of course, is also just a search engine.