Important Terms and Phrases All Bloggers Should Be Familiar With

Blogging might seem like an easy way for you to establish a presence online, and in so many ways it is. However, if you are looking to get the most out of your blogging experience it is of grave importance to be familiar with all the different terms and phrases that are part of the everyday-life of any blogger. Once you are familiar with the different terms it will immediately strengthen your blogging skills, and you will be in a much better position to utilize the different tools at your disposal. But forgive me, I digress, let's just get to it and start to sort out the different terms.

• Blog
  You're laughing? Well don't! Even though you might think you know what the definition of a blog is, you would be surprised by number of people out there who don't, and not to mention how differently some people define what a blog is. Generally a blog is considered to be a website with one or more authors that write and publish articles/posts that are organized in a reversed chronological order, with newest on top. The name is derived from the word "weblog".
  
  There are many things that characterize a blog, and all of the terms will we put the spotlight on in this article are typical things that places a website in the blog category. One important characteristic about blogs however, is that it is part of the evolved internet experience that makes it easy for people to create and submit content online. In other words, a blog is easy to setup and manage, even for those without any specific technical knowledge.

• Posts and Pages
  These two have many people confused, and people who are new to blogging often use the interchangeably without ever really knowing that there is infact a difference between them. It is time to put down the marker and make it clear once and for all what the difference between a post and a page is.
  
  Posts are the heart and soul of a blog, and it is in many ways what seperates a blog from the more traditional websites. Posts are all the articles that are posted within a blog's traditional hierarchy, and they are seperated and sorted as suggested above, in a reversed chronological order.
  
  Pages on the other hand, are articles that are posted outside of the blog's main hierarchy, and they are not part of the blog per se, even though they are very much present on the same website, or blog that is. A good example of a page is for instance when the author wants to write a short article about him or herself. Naturally he or she would want this page to be easily accessible for everyone, and not drop to the bottom of everything once the author starts writing a good number of posts. The solution? A static page that lives outside the post-hierarchy, and is always easily accessible to the reader.

• Categories and Tags
  These are the two most popular ways of organizing the contents/posts in a blog. As good as every blog features a category listing, and by clicking into that category readers will find all the posts related to the specified topic of the category.
  
  Tags very much serve the same purpose as categories, but they are considered to be more flexible, and usually a blog post can have a numerous amount of tags, whereas it is normally limited to just one or a few categories. This makes it easier for the reader to find related posts, and some blogs often feature a tag cloud, which highlights the most popular tags on the particular blog, making it easy to see what the author most often writes about.

• Comments
  Okay, I'll admit this is an easy one, and most people will know what a comment is without any further explanation needed, but I thought it would be nice to include it just for the sake of it. Traditionally all blog posts are open for commenting, and all readers are able to comment on the contents of the post. In some cases though commenting might be restricted to for instance only users that have registered and confirmed their e-mail, or in another way proven to the author of the blog that they should be granted permission to post comments. Why would one want to restrict people from commenting? There can be a various of reasons to that, but the chief reason is without a doubt the next point on our list.

• Comment Spam
  As blogging has grown increasingly popular, people with bad intentions have found ways to use this to their advantage. A typical result of this is comment spam, which is frustrating to 99% of the bloggers out there.
  
  The main purpose of comment spam is to post links to their own websites, if they can even be characterized as that, where they are most likely to earn a few cents for each person who stops by. Does that sound little and not worthwhile the effort to you? It is, and that is why most of the comment spam is performed by bots, or scripts if you wish, that automatically finds blogs and posts related to the topic of their sites (or more often that not, completely unrelated) and spams down their comments with dozens upon dozens of links. Thankfully there have been developed very sophisticated tools to fight comment spam these days, and it certainly makes the dailylife of any blogger much more pleasant.

• Incoming and Outgoing Links
  While hyperlinks are nothing new to the that was introduced by blogging, it is of enormous impact to blogging society. Traditionally a blogger will write about something that interests him or her, and then without even thinking twice in the article the writer will link to the other websites or blogs that inspired his or her post in the first place. And then when another blogger reads that article, he or she again might be inspired to write a post of their own, and link back to the first.
  
  This is an extremely important part of the blogging experience, because it helps make the flow of content more organic, and the readers can easily read up one many different points of view on a single case without too much effort. It is also partly what has made blogging so popular in the first place, because there can be an ongoing debate between different bloggers, with both being on their "home turf", or so to speak.

• Blogroll
  Many people have seen the word blogroll and wondered what in the world that might be, but in reality it is a very simple term to grasp. Basically it is simply just a list of links to blogs that the author of a certain blog would like to reccomend to his or her readers.
  
  Needless to say different bloggers have different criterias on how a blog can make it to their blogroll. Some people only care whether or not the blog is interesting, while others will link to a blog if the other blog is willing to link back, and some might even charge other bloggers to be listed on their blogroll.

• Permalink
  A permalink is simply a link directly to a single blogpost. It it used when you wish to post a link directly to a specific post in a blog. Usually the permalink to a blog post is clearly marked, and more often than not the title of the blogpost is a permalink to that specific post.

• Trackback
  This is something that many bloggers have gone for years without really knowing what is, let alone utilized its possibilities. A trackback is something you can send to another blog in order to alert it that you've commented on their post, or quoted them in your own post. It is useful because it is a simple way of communicating with other bloggers and letting them and their readers know that you are chiming in on the discussion.
  
  In many ways you can say that trackbacks are actually part of the same thing as linking between blogs, just a very simple and nearly automated way of doing it. Most types of blog software sports the possibility of automatically doing a trackback when writing a new post by simply inputting the URL (address) of the blogs you wish to leave a trackback at, and WordPress will automatically try to ping the URLs that you have linked to in a specific article.

• Ping
  The ping is part of the trackback system, as it is the operation that takes place when you alert another blog or website that you have written a post. Pinging can also be used to notify other sources, such as blog search engines or feedreaders, that you have written a new post.

• Feeds and Feedreaders
  The concept of feeds is another thing that makes the world of blogging so pleasant. Basically each blog has its own feed, and readers can add that feed to their feedreaders and then easily see when you've made a new post in your blog. The most popular format for feeds is known as RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. A feedreader, which is sometimes also referred to as a feed- or RSS aggregator can be another website that lets people add all their favourite blogs to one place, or it can be a program on their own computer.
  
  Today most up-to-date internet browsers come with the possibility of organizing feeds. Needless to say this possibility is priceless when someone reads tens if not hundreds of blogs, because that way they don't necessarily need to visit them all everytime they are online to see if they have written any new posts.

• Social Bookmarking
  This refers to various online services such as for instance del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit, where people can share their favourite blogposts. Once a post has been shared, other people can join in and reccomend it, and as a post gets more reccomendations it will become increasingly popular. Sites such as Digg are notoriously known for bringing down blogs, because it has the ability to make an article so popular that the server that hosts the blog can't handle the pressure.

• Blogosphere
  When someone refers to the community of blogging they might use the world blogosphere as a collective term to group all blogs into a single community. The term was, according to Wikipedia, coined by Brad Graham as a joke as early as back in 1999.

• Audio- and Videoblogging, Pod- and Videocasting
  With the internet growing at a fast pace, and people getting more powerful connections, audio and videoblogging has become increasingly popular. Just as the name suggest, it is blogging with sound or picture or both. The term podcast was made popular by Apple, who lets audiobloggers push their audioblogs on to iTunes, so that people can easily download them and listen to them on their iPods. A videoblog is also often referred to as a vlog.

• Photoblogging
  Just as the name suggest, photoblogging is just blogging with added pictures. Photoblogging became increasingly popular when mobilephones with cameras hit the market, and some services made it possible for their users to simply send a photo from their mobilephone directly on to their blog without even touching a computer!

There you have it, the most important terms and phrases that every blogger should be familiar with. Once you have gone through each and every one of them, you should have a more clear grasp of how the blogging society works, and how each and every blog is interconnected in a large, worldwide network.

Did I miss any important terms or phrases? Feel free to comment, and I will add them to this little dictionary for bloggers!