Who Really Invented the Blog?

Although they've never claimed credit for it, I think that Amazon.com really invented the blog when they created their customer review function. Now Amazon has introduced comments to the customer reviews.

With Amazon's customer reviews feature millions of people finally had an easy way to express themselves on a forum where someone might actually read what they had to say. This is especially true if you read the reviews of controversial books or ideologically loaded polemics like Ann Coulter's or her counterparts on the left. You'll see that people who clearly haven't read the book are using the user friendliness of the review feature to vent their spleen and argue with each other.

Amazon prohibits embedding HTML in reviews, but I've seen plenty where people include urls as part of their screen name.

Now that Amazon has added the ability of readers to comment on another's review, it may only be a matter of time before they allow reviwers to include hypertext, images and sounds to their reviews. Perhaps the next step after that will be the ability to place advertising in your review for a small fee.