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Q & A If you have a blog, you already know what a blog is. But are you up to speed on all the technical lingo? Here are some important technical terms you might come across.
What is a Blog A blog, short for weblog, is an online journal or diary that is updated frequently and contains information including reviews, thoughts and personal opinions in reverse chronological order. Posting new entries to a blog is called blogging, and a person who keeps a blog is called a blogger. Blogs were originally very personal in nature, but the use of blogs has expanded to include companies keeping corporate blogs to communicate and interact with their customers.
How Many Blogs Are There? As of November 2006, the largest blog directory, Technorati, was keeping track of 57 million (!) blogs. According to eMarketer, a new blog is launched every single second. Chances are no matter what you are searching for there is someone out there that has dedicated a blog to that topic. For example, the ineedhits blog is dedicated to search engine marketing, and the ineedbloghits blog is all about blogging!
How to Start a Blog If you haven't got a blog yet, you can choose from a number of free blog platforms. The most popular ones include Blogger, Wordpress and Movable Type. The blogging platforms differ in their ease of use and technical requirements. About.com has a good overview of free blog software and hosting providers.
What's a Ping? Ping is short for Packet Internet Gropher and is a simple Internet program that allows you to verify whether an Internet address exists and can accept requests. With blogs, you can ping blog search engines when you create it or whenever a new post has been added so that your blog is added to a list of recently updated blogs and your listing is refreshed. This means new blog posts can become instantly visible to the world.
RSS Short for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a XML format for delivering regularly changing web content. RSS feeds are offered by blogs and other informative sites. Anyone can subscribe to RSS feeds in various formats, this way, news and new web content alerts will automatically be delivered to you whenever they are published.
Vlog Short for video blog. Instead of typing in entries on your blog, you record a video and post that on your blog.
TrackBack This is used when a person reads an entry in another person’s blog and chooses to write about that entry in their own blog. By using a TrackBack the original blog writer is notified so they will know who blogged about their own blog entry. TrackBacks use pinging to exchange this information.
Pingback Pingback allows bloggers to request notification when somebody links to one of their blog post. With Pingbacks, bloggers can keep track of who is linking to their blog posts. Some blogging software supports automatic pingbacks, which means that all links contained in a blog can be pinged as sooon as the blog article is posted. | |
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