I don't know why Dave Winer [aka Dave3 to your right, my left] has to start history with himself. He made this point correcting the beginning of time to 1997 from 1999 as proposed by the Columbia Journalism Review. Trouble is, it is clearly five years too late - as the first weblog / web log was in 1992. The real culprit is too much blinglish, trying to force the dissection of a continuum. This is not to say that the real key to mass participation was not the creation of easy-peasy content management tools for amateurs which Dave3 certainly did play a big part in. The best thing about Dave3 in his writing is his real amateur enthusiasm - the far better, more honourable half of enthusiasm. He is even going to Zap which will place him in the room with my fifth-cousin-in-law, this [, gee, 25 year old] guy, at this guy's place with this guy but not, interestingly, this guy despite his pre-Dave3, pre-blog, Telco-wireless-monopoly-destroying powers. I will be interested to read people writing about it on their personal webpages.