Beginners' blogging glossary
Glossary for ABSOLUTE Beginners to Blogging
I've cut things down to the minimum necessary to make this resource as useful as possible for beginners, giving you the main info you need about blogging terms, all on one page. Follow the titles for more information, as and when you want it. This resource is frequently updated with more information, but never more than you need. Please do let me know if you'd like something explained; your questions will help me to help many more aspiring bloggers too.
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Definitions
Blog
(n, v)
(n) A website, usually organised chronologically, which is usually updated regularly and/or frequently.
(v) The activity of maintaining or updating a blog.
Blogger
(n) People who blog
(n) Name of a popular, hosted blogging platform by Google
Blogging platform
(n) Something used to create blogs. There are two types – hosted & self-hosted.
1. Hosted
Examples: Blogger, WordPress.com, TypePad
Characteristics:
+ Positives: Less work involved in setting up.
- Negatives: Usually you don't own the address of blogs you create with these – it will look like example.blogspot.com, instead of example.com. Often there is a commercial version. Not recommended for anyone who is or would like to be a professional blogger.
2. Self-hosted
Examples: WordPress.org
Characteristics:
+ Positives: You own the address of your blog (it will look like example.com) and have complete control over everything. Recommended for everyone who is or might be serious about blogging, especially professionals & entrepreneurs.
- Negatives: You will have to do some tech stuff yourself (or find someone to do it for you). You will need to buy a domain and hosting. It's a lot of work, but it doesn't have to be hard. The WordPress for beginners resource exists solely to help you, with all you need for using WordPress.org successfully and without headaches.
See also, Blog, Wikipedia definition
Blogosphere
"Blogosphere is the collective term encompassing all blogs as a community or social network. Many weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read others' blogs, link to them, reference them in their own writing, and post comments on each others' blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture."
Blogosphere, Wikipedia definition
See also, Blogosphere, Wordpress definition
Domain
(n) The address of your site or blog – what you type in to get to it. E.g. example.com You will need to buy one of these if you choose a self-hosted blogging platform.
Hosting
The place online where your pages and content are kept. You will need to buy this if you choose a self-hosted blogging platform.
Marketing 2.0
"Marketing 2.0. More authenticity, transparency, dialogue, proof, and education are the only way to overcome heavy skepticism according to this “new” school of thought."
More about Marketing 2.0, by Copyblogger
Page Rank (Google)
SEO (part of)
PageRank is a unique feature of the Google search engine service. PageRank is available to your browser by installing the Google toolbar plugin, (available here).
"Google's philosophy of returning results of value to the searcher brought about their page rank theory. Google decided the only true indication of the quality of your page was how many other sites linked to it. Each of these incoming links is concidered a vote for the content of your page. The more pages linking to yours, the more important your content must be" and therefore the higher PageRank (out of a possible 10) your site will have.
More about PageRank, including how to increase yours, by W3B
RSS
Web feed / XML / Atom
"Unlike conventional sites which rarely change their contents, blogs (online journal) are usually updated frequently. In order to keep up with what's happening on blogs, there are 'web feeds', 'feed readers' take the content from selected blogs and deliver it to you, all in one place. This means you can scan and select new and updated material without checking blogs all the time."
On LiveJournal, at syn_promo (a community for the promotion of Lj-syndicated feeds), one user came across a feed URL, but overlooked it thinking feed URLs had to end in '.xml', which isn't true.
One of the most common formats for feed URLs is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Example
More about feeds/RSS, my easy-to-understand definition
See also, Web feed, Wikipedia definition
Web 2.0
See also, Web 2.0, Wikipedia definition
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