Blogs

"You gotta love blogging.  Where else can you get only one link and be in the top 4%, ranking above average?" 
- Technorati's Dave Sifry at Northern Voice 2006

Blogs are a wonderful tool for people to publish and read about things that matter to them, and for joining in on conversations with others who have similar interests.

Who cares about blogs?

• The 2006 Pew Internet Report states that 8 percent of Internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog, and that 39 percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs.
  
  
• According to Sifry's Alerts, as of October 2006, 100,000 new weblogs are created daily.
  
  This is what makes them such a powerful marketing tool for targeting your like-minded customer segments.
  
  call me for help getting started with your blog
  
  

  "Folksonomy"...
  managing unruly content made easy(er)
  
  
  Blog Terms Explained

audioblog
A blog where the posts consist mainly of voice recordings sent by mobile phone, sometimes with some short text message added for metadata purposes. (cf. podcasting)

blogging
Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called "blogging". Individual articles on a blog are called "blog posts," "posts," or "entries". A person who posts these entries is called a "blogger".

blog client
(weblog client) is software to manage (post, edit) blogs from 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 feed
The XML-based file in which the blog hosting software places a machine-readable version of the blog so that it may be "syndicated" for further distribution on the web. Formats such as RSS and Atom are used to structure the XML file.

blogosphere
All blogs, or the blogging community.

blogroll
A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs, usually of common interest to the blogger whose site they are listed on.

To UK bloggers 'blogroll' sounds like 'bog roll' — a slang term for toilet tissue — leading to speculation that the name derived from the long, list-like nature (and dubious quality) of some inter-blog link lists.

dark blog
A non-public blog (e.g. behind a firewall)

flog
"fake + blog".
A blog that's ghostwritten by someone, such as in the marketing department.

milblog
Term for blogs written by members or veterans of any branch of service - Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines. A contraction of military and blog.

moblog
"mobile + blog"
A blog featuring posts sent mainly by mobile phone, using SMS or MMS messages. They are often photoblogs.

permalink
Permanent link. The unique URL of a single post. Use this when you want to link to a post somewhere.

photoblog
A blog mostly containing photos, posted constantly and chronologically.

ping
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.” Posting audio and video material on a blog and its RSS feed, for digital players.

rss aggregator
Software or online service allowing a blogger to read an RSS feed, especially the latest posts on his favourite blogs. Also called a reader, or feedreader.

rss feed
The file containing a blog’s latest posts. It is read by an RSS aggregator/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 a post, or the entire post.

splog
A blog which is composed of spam. A Spam blog or "any blog whose creator doesn't add any written value."

technorati
Technorati is the authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs. Currently tracking 24.5 million sites and 1.8 billion links.

troll
A commenter whose sole purpose is to attack the views expressed on a blog and incite a flamewar, for example, a liberal going to a conservative blog, or vice versa.

web feed
While RSS feed is by far the most common term, the generic "web feed" terminology is sometimes used by writers hoping to make the concept clear to novice users, and by advocates of other feed formats. Web feeds are most commonly found in various RSS formats or the standardised Atom format.


resources: Wikipedia, Technorati