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. Until 2009, 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.
Movable Type is a weblog publishing system developed by the company Six Apart. It was publicly announced on September 3, 2001; version 1.0 was publicly released on October 8, 2001. The current version is 8.0.
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.
Spam in blogs is a form of spamdexing which utilizes internet sites which allow content to be publicly posted, in order to artificially inflate their website ranking by linking back to their web pages. Backlink 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.
Anil Dash is an American technology executive, entrepreneur, Prince scholar and writer. He is the Head of Glitch and VP of Developer Experience at Fastly.
Benjamin Trott is a co-founder of Six Apart, creator of Movable Type and TypePad. In November 2010, he became Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of SAY Media, a new online advertising and software company formed by a merger of ad network VideoEgg with Six Apart.
Typepad is a blogging service owned by Endurance International Group, previously owned by SAY Media. Originally launched in October 2003, Typepad is based on Six Apart's Movable Type platform, and shares technology with Movable Type such as templates and APIs, but is marketed to non-technical users and includes additional features like multiple author support, photo albums and mobile blogging.
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.
Mena Grabowski Trott is a co-founder of Six Apart, creator of Movable Type and TypePad.
MarsEdit is a blog post editor for the Mac made by Red Sweater Software. It can be used to write, edit, and publish blog posts, and supports many popular blogging services, such as WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and Movable Type.
Vox was an Internet blogging service run by Six Apart. Announced on September 21, 2005 by Six Apart president Mena Trott at the DEMO Fall conference under the codename "Project Comet," the site began private alpha testing in March 2006. In June 2006, the site entered public beta—opening registration to outside users on a limited basis via an invitation system—and transitioned to its official name Vox, moving the site to the domain Vox.com. Vox officially launched on October 26, 2006, with registration opened to the general public.
Say Media is a technology and advertising firm. The company provides a publishing platform (Tempest) to professional publishers and sells advertising across that platform and extended network of sites. Say Media has offices in San Francisco, Portland, NY, London, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, and Detroit and is privately held.
Windows Live Writer is a discontinued desktop blog-publishing application that was developed by Microsoft and distributed as part of the Windows Live suite of apps. The last major release of Windows Live Writer came out in 2012 (end-of-life), and the software was completely discontinued in January 2017.
Loïc Le Meur is a French entrepreneur and blogger. He served as Executive Vice President EMEA at software company Six Apart after merging French blogging company Ublog with Six Apart in July 2004. In late 2006 Le Meur became a public backer of French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and joined Sarkozy's campaign team as an advisor on Internet-related topics.
Christopher J. Alden is an American entrepreneur best known as a co-founder of Red Herring, a magazine focused on the business of technology, and Rojo.com, an early web-based RSS reader. Alden was chairman and chief executive officer of the blogging company Six Apart, Ltd. from September 2006 to October 2010 when Six Apart was sold to VideoEgg, forming SAY Media. He is a venture partner of Tugboat Ventures.
Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the major reason for their popularity. Some popular social networks such as Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, Koo, and Instagram can be viewed as collections of microblogs.
Pownce was a free social networking and micro-blogging site started by Internet entrepreneurs Kevin Rose, Leah Culver, and Daniel Burka. Pownce was centered on sharing messages, files, events, and links with friends. The site launched on June 27, 2007, and was opened to the public on January 22, 2008. On December 1, 2008, Pownce announced that it had been acquired by blogging company Six Apart, and that the service would soon shut down. It was subsequently shut down on December 15, 2008.
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.
ecto is a commercial weblog client for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It allows one to compose and store blog entries on the local desktop computer, then upload them to a weblog host. ecto interacts with popular server software such as Blogger, Movable Type, and WordPress, among others. The developer believes the additional flexibility of the desktop operating system allows the client to incorporate features lacking in web-based clients. For example, ecto incorporates spell checking, easy insertion of images, and text formatting. ecto employs the standard controls the operating system provides to all applications. It can also trackback to other blogs and add categories and tags to a blog entry. The Macintosh version integrates with iTunes and iPhoto.
Leah Culver is a computer programmer, startup founder, and angel investor.
