What happened in 2005?

So I'm doing a chart of all the blogs written about japan by French ex pats that I can find, and most of them were started in 2005.

Was 2005 a significant date for blogs? Or just for French blogs?

Here' a selection from an article written in 2005 about blogs... 20/20 is pretty funny

In the blink of an eye, blogs became big.

COPYRIGHT 2005 The Philadelphia Inquirer
Byline: Daniel Rubin

PHILADELPHIA _ How big have blogs become?

Bigger than Jesus. Bigger than sex.

More than twice as big as sex, actually, the CEO of Blogpulse found when he typed the words blog and sex into the Google search engine. That big.

If 2004 was the year blogs entered the language (so says Merriam-Webster), then 2005 was the year they found their voice. Mainstream media embraced blogs, corporations embraced blogs, spammers embraced blogs.

It was a time of great convergence, with indie blogs joining together to capture audience and advertising, as brand-name media shed their institutional voices to go unfiltered where the readers were.

Nine percent of American adults who surf the Web write blogs, according to Pew's Internet and American Life Project _ that's 13 million people. And 27 percent of Internet users read them _ 39 million Americans....