We're donning the party hats, ordering in a cake and counting down the minutes until it's acceptable to crack open the champagne, down at BusinessGreen.com's central London bunker this week.

Yes, you've guessed it, it's our birthday - BusinessGreen.com is officially one year old.

BusinessGreen.com was conceived when it was launched as a blog back in the summer of 2006 - a significant date that means we were up and running (fractionally) before An Inconvenient Truth got the whole green bandwagon moving - but it was on October 12th that the title was born as a full blown website.

Since then a lot has changed.

We've moved a step closer to understanding the secrets of the universe - or would have done if that big machine in Switzerland hadn't broke.

We've welcomed a moose-shooting, self-styled pitbull on to the international stage - and if the polls are anything to go by could be ushering off again pretty soon.

And we've seen the entire capitalist system collapse, return to life, collapse, and stagger back to its feet again - and that's just been the last fortnight.

But, more pertinently for BusinessGreen.com readers, we've seen the inexorable march into the mainstream of green products, services, technologies, business models and regulations continue almost unabated.

One of the biggest changes I've noticed in the past year is that no one asks whether the green movement is just hype anymore.

Some siren voices may have begun to suggest that maybe it should slip down the priority list as the economic downturn begins to bite. But it is worth remembering that not only are they being challenged at every turn by more enlightened politicians and business leaders, but the very fact that they are being shouted down represents significant progress. If the recession had come just two years ago, there would not even have been a debate - the green agenda would have been dropped, no questions asked.

Instead, it is now happily ensconced in the mainstream, and there is even a growing consensus that it could prosper in a downturn driven in large part by high energy prices and businesses failure to properly comprehend risk.

Anyone doubting this fact need only look at the figures. This week alone we've seen research claiming that the global market will be worth more than $100bn this year, while companies operating in the clean tech sector are now worth $300bn, according to HSBC, making the sector bigger than the entire economy of Greece. The last quarter also broke another record for venture capital clean tech investment, while every expert, analyst, and industry insider you speak to is convinced that the upward trends will continue.

In its own modest way, BusinessGreen.com has mirrored some of this success. Traffic figures have ticked steadily north over the course of the year to a level where we now have a sizable reader community regularly accessing the site. Consequently, we have enjoyed solid advertiser backing (big thanks to our founding sponsor IBM), providing further evidence of the extent to which firms are increasingly committed to building and promoting their green credentials.

And yet, while much has changed in the past year, much remains the same.

In many ways, this is good news as the fundamental drivers behind the growing interest in green business models - rising energy costs, fear over energy security, customer demand for environmentally-friendly products, realisation of climate change risks and tighter regulation - remain firmly in place, ensuring that the whole sector has a healthy future.

But equally, many of the factors that originally prompted us to think there was a need for a title such as BusinessGreen.com are also still in place.

There is still a major gap between businesses desire to enhance their environmental performance and their understanding of how best to do so. There is still a gap between the technical and economic viability of new low carbon products. There is still a gap between the urgent requirement to act now to tackle climate change and the actual actions being taken. And there is still a gap between politicians' rhetoric on climate change and the funding and regulations they put in place to drive our response.

Until those gaps are closed the case for a title dedicated to helping firms understand how and why they should be adopting green business models will remain.

Given that reality, it looks like BusinessGreen.com can look forward to plenty more birthdays to come.