From a period before the current Blog breakout, http://www.nathan.com/thoughts/personalsites/index.html

"Personal websites are one of the few new forms of personal expression to arise out of the last few decades--certainly out of the computer and media industries. No longer a simple curiosity, the growth in personal websites points to some inherent need people have for self-expression."

The distinction between blogs and personal websites? ... not much, just that with personal CMS to take care of mechanical timestamping and archiving of entries many, many more people can treat a website as a journal.