Glossary of blogging

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This is a list of blogging terms. Blogging, like any hobby, has developed something of a specialized vocabulary. The following is an attempt to explain a few of the more common phrases and words, including etymologies when not obvious.

Contents

A

Atom
A popular feed format developed as an alternative to RSS.
Autocasting
An automated form of podcasting that allows bloggers and blog readers to generate audio versions of text blogs from RSS feeds.
Audioblog
A blog where the posts consist mainly of voice recordings sent by mobile phone, sometimes with some short text messages added for metadata purposes. (cf. podcasting)

B

Beauty Blog
Beauty blogs are niche blogs that cover cosmetics, makeup or skincare related topics, events, product launches, product reviews, nail-art, makeup trends, highly curated products, insider tips from tastemakers and celebrities, et cetera.
Blawg
A blog about law and legal issues. [1]
Bleg
An entry in a blog requesting information or contributions. A portmanteau of "blog" and "beg." also called "Lazyweb."
Blog Carnival
A blog article that contains links to other articles covering a specific topic. Most blog carnivals are hosted by a rotating list of frequent contributors to the carnival, and serve to both generate new posts by contributors and highlight new bloggers posting matter in that subject area.
Blog client
(weblog client) is software to manage (post, edit) blogs from the operating system with no need to launch a web browser. A typical blog client has an editor, a spell-checker, and a few more options that simplify content creation and editing.
Blog publishing service
A software that is used to create the blog. Some of the most popular are WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and Joomla.
Blogger
Person who runs a blog. Also blogger.com, a popular blog hosting website. Rarely weblogger.
Bloggernacle
Blogs written by and for Mormons (a portmanteau of "blog" and "Tabernacle"). Generally refers to faithful Mormon bloggers and sometimes refers to a specific grouping of faithful Mormon bloggers.
Bloggies
One of the most popular blog awards
Blogroll
A list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list).
Blogosphere
All blogs, or the blogging community.
Blogware
A category of software that consists of a specialized form of a Content Management System specifically designed for creating and maintaining weblogs.
The BOBs
The largest international blog awards.

C

Catblogging (traditionally "Friday catblogging", sometime "Caturday")
The practice of posting pictures of cats, in typical cat postures and expressions, on a blog.
Collaborative blog
A blog (usually focused on a single issue or political stripe) on which multiple users enjoy posting permission. Also known as group blog.
Comment spam
Like e-mail spam. Robot “spambots” flood a blog with advertising in the form of bogus comments. A serious problem that requires bloggers and blog platforms to have tools to exclude some users or ban some addresses in comments.

D

Desktop Blogging Client
An off-line blog management (posting, editing, and archiving) tool
Domain Name
A domain name is the name of a blog/website. Google.com and Wikipedia.org are examples of blogs/websites' names.

E

Event blogging
When marketers create new blogs for upcoming events. For that, they buy EMDs or exact match domains for the upcoming events to attract people who are searching for that event. Because their domain is rich with keywords, they get better rankings in search engines. However, to establish an event blog, event bloggers may start working on their blogs 6 months or more before the event to make a decent amount of content and to get quality backlinks.

F

Fisking /To fisk
To rebut a news report line-by-line, or the result of doing so. [2] [3]
Flog
A portmanteau of "fake" and "blog"; a form of astroturfing.
A food blog; sometimes, a blog dedicated to food porn.
Feeds
RSS Feeds.

H

Health blog
A blog that covers health topics, events, and/or related content of the health industry and the general community. In short, anything related to health.

J

J-blog
A journalist blog.
A blog with a Jewish focus.

L

Legal blog
A blog about the law.
Lifelog
A blog that captures a person's entire life.
List blog
A blog consisting solely of list-style posts.
Listicle
A short-form of writing that uses a list as its thematic structure but is fleshed out with sufficient copy to be published as an article.
Litblog
A blog that focuses primarily on the topic of literature.

M

Milblog
A blog written by members or veterans of any branch of military service - Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines. A contraction of military and blog.
Moblog
A portmanteau of "mobile" and "blog". A blog featuring posts sent mainly by mobile phone, using SMS or MMS messages. They are often photoblogs.
Mommy blog
A blog featuring discussions especially about home and family.
Multiblog
A blog constructed as a conversation between more than two people.

P

Permalink
Permanent link. The unique URL of a single post. Use this when you want to link to a post somewhere.
Phlog
Type of blog utilising the Gopher protocol instead of HTTP
A Photoblog. A portmanteau of "photo" and "blog".
Photoblog
A blog mostly containing photos, posted constantly and chronologically.
Pingback
The alert in the TrackBack system that notifies the original poster of a blog post when someone else writes an entry concerning the original post.
Podcasting
Contraction of “iPod” and “broadcasting” (but not for iPods only). Posting audio and video material on a blog and its RSS feed, for digital players.
Post or blog Post
A blog post is a piece of writings in the form of an article that's published on a blog by a blogger.
Post Slug
For blogs with common language URLs, the post slug is the portion of the URL that represents the post, such as "all-about-my-holiday" in www.example.com/all-about-my-holiday

R

RSS
Really Simple Syndication is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, or podcasts.
RSS aggregator
Software or online service allowing a blogger to read an RSS feed, especially the latest posts on their favorite blogs. Also called a reader or feedreader.
RSS feed
The file containing a blog’s latest posts It is read by an RSS aggregator or reader and shows at once when a blog has been updated. It may contain only the title of the post, the title plus the first few lines of tha post, or the entire post.

S

Search engine friendly URLs
or, for short, SEF URLs, implemented via URL mapping.
Spam blog
A blog that is composed of spam. A Spam blog or "any blog whose creator doesn't add any written value."
Slashdot effect
The Slashdot effect can hit blogs or another website, and is caused by a major website (usually Slashdot, but also Digg, Metafilter, Boing Boing, Instapundit and others) sending huge amounts of temporary traffic that often slow down the server.
Soldierblog
see Milblog
Subscribe
The term used when a blogs feed is added to a feed reader like Bloglines or Google. Some blogging platforms have internal subscriptions, this allows readers to receive a notification when there are new posts in a blog. A subscriber is a person who is willing to receive blogger's news and updates.

T

Templates
Templates, used on the "back end" of a blog that works together to handle information and present it on a blog.
Theme
CSS based code that when applied to the templates will result in visual element changes to the blog. The theme, as a whole, is also referred to as a blog design.
TrackBack
A system that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written another entry concerning it. The system works by sending a 'ping' between the blogs and therefore providing the alert.

V

Vlog
A video blog; a vlogger is a video blogger (e.g. someone who records himself interviewing people of a certain field).

W

Warblog
A blog devoted mostly or wholly to covering news events concerning an ongoing war.
Weblog
The unshortened version of 'blog'.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Winer</span> American software developer, entrepreneur and writer (born 1955)

Dave Winer is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and writer who resides in New York City. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services, as well as blogging and podcasting. He is the founder of the software companies Living Videotext, Userland Software and Small Picture Inc., a former contributing editor for the Web magazine HotWired, the author of the Scripting News weblog, a former research fellow at Harvard Law School, and current visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blog</span> Discussion or informational site published on the internet

A blog is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. In the 2000s, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RSS</span> Family of web feed formats

RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitors sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device.

A trackback allows one website to notify another about an update. It is one of four types of linkback methods for website authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to their articles. Some weblog software, such as SilverStripe, WordPress, Drupal, and Movable Type, supports automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of linkback.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atom (web standard)</span> Web standards

The name Atom applies to a pair of related Web standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

Spam in blogs is a form of spamdexing which utilizes internet sites that allow content to be publicly posted, in order to artificially inflate their website ranking by linking back to their web pages. Backlinking helps search algorithms determine the popularity of a web page, which plays a major role for search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing to decide a web page ranking on a certain search query. This helps the spammer's website to list ahead of other sites for certain searches, which helps them to increase the number of visitors to their website.

A milblog or warblog is a blog devoted mostly or wholly to covering news events concerning an ongoing war. Sometimes the use of the term "warblog" implies that the blog concerned has a pro-war slant. The term "milblog" implies that the author is a member of, or has some connection to the military; the more specific term "soldierblog" is sometimes used for the former.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web feed</span> Data format

On the World Wide Web, a web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe a channel to it by adding the feed resource address to a news aggregator client. Users typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a feed or clicking a link in a web browser or by dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator, thus "RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website in a simple form for your computer."

A permalink or permanent link is a URL that is intended to remain unchanged for many years into the future, yielding a hyperlink that is less susceptible to link rot. Permalinks are often rendered simply, that is, as clean URLs, to be easier to type and remember. Most modern blogging and content-syndication software systems support such links. Sometimes URL shortening is used to create them.

Radio UserLand is a software package from UserLand Software, first released in 2000, which includes not only a client-side blogging tool but also an RSS aggregator, an outliner and a scripting language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blosxom</span> FOSS blogging software

Blosxom is a free-software weblog program written in Perl by Rael Dornfest. It uses the pre-existing file system instead of a database management system, unlike most blog software.

The Mormon blogosphere is a segment of the blogosphere focused on issues related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">News aggregator</span> Client software that aggregates syndicated web content

In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital content such as online newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and video blogs (vlogs) in one location for easy viewing. The updates distributed may include journal tables of contents, podcasts, videos, and news items.

In blogging, a ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent from the weblog to one or more Ping servers, as specified by originating weblog), to notify a list of their "Services" of new content on the weblog.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photoblog</span> Blog focussing on or consisting of photography

A photoblog is a form of photo sharing and publishing in the format of a blog. It differs from a blog through the predominant use of and focus on photographs rather than text. Photoblogging gained momentum in the early 2000s with the advent of the moblog and cameraphones.

Podcasts, previously known as "audioblogs", have roots dating back to the 1980s. With the advent of broadband Internet access and portable digital audio playback devices such as the iPod, podcasting began to catch hold in late 2004. Today there are more than 115,000 English-language podcasts available on the Internet, and dozens of websites available for distribution at little or no cost to the producer or listener.

Mobile blogging is a method of publishing to a website or blog from a mobile phone or other handheld device. A moblog helps habitual bloggers to post write-ups directly from their phones even when on the move. Mobile blogging has been made possible by technological convergence, as bloggers have been able to write, record and upload different media all from a single, mobile device. At the height of its growth in 2006, mobile blogging experienced 70,000 blog creations a day and 29,100 blog posts an hour. Between 2006 and 2010, blogging among teens declined from 28% to 14%, while blogging among adults over 30 increased from 7% to 11%. However, the growing number of multi-platform blogging apps has increased mobile blogging popularity in recent years creating a brand new market that many celebrities, regular bloggers and specialists are utilizing to widen their social reach.

While the term "blog" was not coined until the late 1990s, the history of blogging starts with several digital precursors to it. Before "blogging" became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with "threads". Threads are topical connections between messages on a metaphorical "corkboard". Some have likened blogging to the Mass-Observation project of the mid-20th century.

By Common Consent (BCC) is a group blog featuring commentary and discussions, especially regarding the culture of and current events within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was founded in 2004 and is one of several blogs in the group known as the Mormon Bloggernacle. According to the blog's mission statement, BCC was founded to "provide a thoughtful, enjoyable, and reasonable place to post and discuss Mormon topics."

WebSub is an open protocol for distributed publish–subscribe communication on the Internet. Initially designed to extend the Atom protocols for data feeds, the protocol can be applied to any data type as long as it is accessible via HTTP. Its main purpose is to provide real-time notifications of changes, which improves upon the typical situation where a client periodically polls the feed server at some arbitrary interval. In this way, WebSub provides pushed HTTP notifications without requiring clients to spend resources on polling for changes.

References

  1. "Blawg". Wex . Cornell Law School . Retrieved July 4, 2023.
  2. "Man of war". The Guardian . 13 April 2008. Retrieved 12 April 2022. In 2001, the word 'Fisking' passed into the language, meaning a point-by-point refutation of a news story. The term was named after Fisk because he is such a frequent and, his enemies would say, deserving target of this kind of treatment.
  3. "Blargon". The New York Times . 19 February 2006. Retrieved 12 April 2022. to fisk, from Robert Fisk, a U.K. journalist. That's when you take an article and reprint it on your blog adding your line-by-line critique

Works cited