What exactly is a memoir?

We see and/or use the word often enough.  Shouldn't we know?  If you Google "What exactly is a memoir?" you might find answers like:

• "A memoir is a part of a biography, autobiography or a part of someone's life in a story or a piece of writing."
• "Well, I was taught that a memoir is a specific part of your life. It is not an autobiography. A memoir focuses more on one specific event."
• "memoirs are simply memories"
• "memoir : a narrative composed from personal experience."
• "It is an accounting of a person's life, significant events that happened to them, and a self-acknowledgment of their life. You would usually hope that they would do it with some kind of awareness to demonstrate some wisdom."

To me a memoir is an account of a period of time in someone's life - whether it be one short, specific part of their life or the entire thing. There are many different ways you can create and share a memoir. It can be a book, like The Diary of Anne Frank, a  movie, like Memoirs of a Geisha, you can post it electronically or with ink and paper, it can be in diary format or story format. I think it very appropriate that our technoliteracy memoirs will be presented in a media format. I know my memoir will not be stellar but I think it will be cool.  A great example of an online diary-type memoir can be found here: Pine Point Web Documentary