Jill notes that the term "blog" has been chosen as the top word of 2004 by Merriam-Webster, based on searches to its site. And Barclay Barrios posted a response to the news on the CCCC-Blog list:

For the longest time, those of us working on blogs had to have a
sentence that went something like "Blogs, short for 'weblogs,' are ..."
Well, no more. Coming off the enormous cultural moment of bloggers at
the political conventions, "blog" is now the word of the year. I think we can just write about blogs now.