Blogging Terminology

For newcomers to blogging, some basic terms are introduced here.

A 'weblog' (or 'web log' or 'blog') can mean any authored content with an underlying chronological basis that is published on the World Wide Web. The content may be about any topic and consist of any media, including audio, images and video, though presently the majority of blogs are largely text-based. A blog can be authored by one or more people, who are the blog 'owners', responsible for maintaining the blog.

A blog is made up of 'blog entries', consisting of contributions posted to the blog by the blog owner(s). Entries generally consist of just a title and body and are usually listed chronologically, the most recent first. How many depends upon the hosting application and the blog owner. Typically, entries contain hyperlinks to other Web sites, including other blogs, thus contributing to a more social manner in which the Web is interlinked. Optionally they may allow response from others, most commonly through a comments system, allowing a critique of ideas, suggestions, etc., which some argue is a defining characteristic of a blog. Some of the more popular blogs receive many comments and become discussion threads, but as the owners are always originators of the topic, they retain overall control of the flow.

A digital diary may appear in a virtual void without some means for others to find the blog. Many blog sites host a number of blogs and offer a facility to search across the site's contents, of which usually the title and body fields are indexed. If the site uses a popular hosting provider, then it may be easily picked up by a search engine and added to their index, as detailed in Phil Bradley's column in issue 36 of Ariadne [7]. However, once someone has found your blog, then how do they keep up to date with the latest thoughts? Blogs are designed to be viewed over time and most of them are not updated with uniform regularity, so there needs to be a means for keeping readers informed as and when new entries are authored and also for including extracts. This role is fulfilled by Web content 'syndication' in which a portion of content is made available in a format that can be read by an external source. The most common means is a 'newsfeed' that displays the most recent articles or postings, which typically use de facto standards in XML of which the most popular are RSS in its variants such as Really Simple Syndication and RDF Rich Site Summary and, more recently, Atom.

Picking up the feeds requires a feed reader, for which there are many clients, both online and for the desktop, a number of these detailed in Bradley's survey [7]. The role of combining feeds from multiple sources is fulfilled by 'aggregation'. Public sites such as Bloglines [8] provide a flexible service that can harvest and aggregate feeds from blog sites on an ongoing basis, thereby overcoming limitations inherent in the time-limited supply in feeds. They also provide search and browse facilities to the blogs being subscribed by other users of the service.