Blogging guide-Tips-Tricks-glossary

Term: Lurk
meaning: To observe blogs without participation
Notes: Lurking is probably the first act someone planning to start a blog needs to do. It means basically just observing how people do blogs and how they write and participate to gain enough knowledge the enables them to maybe one day start a blog on their own
Lurking also happens when blog-rivalry happens and suddenly good old blogging friends turn hostile towards each other causing one or both parties to withdraw from the active arena to the lurking stage
Excessive lurking could be considered Stalking

Term: Blog Stalking
Meaning: Someone following a blog for some ill intent of finding private information about the blog owner or readers

Term: Blog Shadowing
Meaning: Someone keeps track of posts and writes contradictory articles or similar articles. Just grabbing the ideas from other's posts

Term: Shameless promotion
Meaning: Posting links to one's own blog in posts, and on other people's blogs when they're unrelated to the article at hand

Term: Copy-and-paste Blogging
Meaning: Having a large number of content that is copied from chain letters, other blogs.

Term: Commentary blogging
Meaning: Grabbing a title or piece of information from another source and just commenting on it. Similar to copy-and-paste blogging but with the additional commentary

Term: Mute blog
Meaning: Blog that has a single video, Audio or picture

Term: Silent blog
Meaning: A blog with an owner that doesn't answer comments

Term: Static blog
Meaning: A blog with comments disabled

Term: Blog hopping
Meaning: Hopping from one blog to another following links or commenter websites

Term: Positive seeding
Meaning: Jumping from blog to blog adding links to relevant matter on one blog. That is very related and mostly appreciated

Term: Negative seeding
Meaning: Jumping from blog to blog leaving very short, silly, unrelated comments, just to fool people doing blog hopping or to increase the number of links to one blog

Term: Referral poisoning
Meaning: Adding links of one website that points to another, or to an article on the blog, in effect making the blog owner follow the referral from their control panel or Analytics/statistics

Term: Referral promotion
Meaning: Adding links to one site that promotes another site. These are usually only available to the site owner and through their stats if they're public

Term: Tag browsing
Meaning: Browsing by a specific category. Usually on blogs that does indexing either contextual or based on tags. The result is finding relative information easily

Term: Active Participation
Meaning: The act of actively getting involved in a post or a blog through commenting and responding to others comments

Term: Blog fan group
Meaning: A number of fans of a specific blog, might be readers or others bloggers that follow a specific blog religiously

Term: Blog accepting group
Meaning: A number of readers that blindly accept everything on a specific blog

Term: Blog rejecting group
Meaning: Number of readers that blindly reject everything in a specific blog bashing the writers or other commenters

Term: Blog Troll
Meaning: A person or a group who visit a blog for the sole purpose of attacking the ideas, owners, or other readers. Usually starting a blog-war

Term: Troll Pack
Meaning: When multiple trolls organise themselves in a bash party that get on a blog and wont shut up until everyone is inline with thier ideas. Although this is annoying, blog owners can send most unwated comments to a blackhole

Term: Blog-wars
Meaning: A feud between two bloggers or more who try to undermine each other either through posts or comments. Other readers bloggers usually join the war based on their affinity with one side or another

Term: Blog Flamewars
Meaning: A smaller scale blog-war usually over a single entry where two or more parties engage in attacking each other

Term: Blog-envy
Meaning: One blogger getting upset that another has better ranking, more comments, more visitors, or better content although this last one is usually viewed as not the determining factor

Term: Blog-rivalry
Meaning: Two bloggers or more involved in a long term blog war

term: Article trackback, pingback, linkback
Meaning: A link from one blog to another on a matter related to the article being discussed.

Term: Comment Spamming
Meaning: Commercial sites using bots or armies of employees that attempt to comment on people's blogs usually with very few words and many links to promote their products or sites

Term: Anonymous browsing
Meaning: Using anonymity tools to block referral, IP and identity of the browser information

Term: Blog ranking
Meaning: Every site on the Internet has a number of rankings from Search engines, indexers and services like Technorati. The higher the ranking the more authority a specific blog has. Very high ranking bloggers are highly revered in the blogosphere. And usually have thousands or even millions of readers. Some are often quoted by the media

Term: Webcasting, Podcasting
Meaning: posting audio or video as articles.

Term: Media embedding
Meaning: Adding music, videos or pictures to a post

Term: User tracking
Meaning: Using tools and logs to track user activity on a blog to better serve them. Or to know which articles are more popular

Term: Blog statistics
Meaning: Using tools or logs to determine where users are coming from. Number of hits. And many other useful information about the behavior of readers viewing a blog

Term: Blog counter
Meaning: A counter that shows the number of hits a specific blog, or article gets

term: comment follow-up
Meaning: The act of responding to a comments left by readers on a specific article

Term: Comment inflation
Meaning: Responding to every commenters with a single comment. In effect causing the number of comments to be huge artificially

Term: Blog statisticoholic
Meaning: Continuously following up on statistics excessively to the point that the owner spends a lot of time following up on these items. Can be a good thing if the blog is under attack, but usually attacks will not register on 3rd party statistics sites

Term: Bad behavior detection
Meaning: users or bots that excessively probe a specific blog through a big number of requests of RSS requests which may be too heavy on the blog hosting server or software

Term: Denial of service (DoS)
Meaning: Using bots or tools to excessively access a specific blog beyond it's capacity causing legitimate users to get denied access, or very slow responses

term: blog-roll
Meaning: A list of other blogs that the blog owner either reads or would like to promote

Term: Blog Tagging, Tag
Meaning: tagging other bloggers in a specific chains, usually helps in promoting other bloggers through blog hopping

Term: Blog subscribers
Meaning: Users who bookmark a blog in their browsers. Some actually sign up to have member only perks

Term: Syndication subscribers
Meaning: Users who subscribe to blog feed to keep updated on the latest posts or comments

Term: Blog Theme, Skin, Template
Meaning: The visual looks of the blog that could be manipulated by the owner. Some blogs even allow reader to customize the way the blog looks based on their preference

Term: Blog Ink
Meaning: Blog that has areas that are editable from the client window

Term: Breadcrumbs
Meaning: Links that show how deep in a specific hierarchy. To allow the user to easily track back their steps to other areas

Term: Blog banning, deny access
Meaning: Denying a specific user or IP from accessing or commenting on a specific blog

Term: Anti-spammer tools
Meaning: Using external or internal services to detect and block unwanted comment spam

Term: Blog captcha
Meaning: Using the touring test to block bots from commenting on a blog

Term: Blogger Narcissism
Meaning: A blogger getting too full of themselves and addicted to their own glory. Usually, googling thier name and thier blog name. To see what other are saying about them, but excessively

Term: Blog aggregator, Blog Farm
Meaning: Online tools that collects and displays latest posts from a blog or blogs that are subscribed to the aggregator in effect promoting their new articles. And keeping the readers and bloggers in touch with each other

Term: Photoblog
Meaning: A blog dedicated for photography with little or no commentary

Term: Post frequency
Meaning: The number of posts per day. If this number is too large or two small that's usually a negative sign. Anything from 1 per day to 4 is usually considered OK

Term: Bloglet
Meaning: A short blog entry or a blog entry that has many unrelated/incoherent short ideas

Term: Blogworthy
Meaning: The owner of a blog discovering that a certain idea or thought is worth blogging about

Term: Blogosphere, Bloggosphere, Blog-o-sphere
Meaning: The entire ecosystem of blogs. It might further be confined to a local like: Jordanian Blogosphere, Arabic Blogosphere ...etc

Term: Hot-linking
Meaning: A very negative procedure in which the blog owner posts a picture that is hosted by other sites. Hot linking is considered very negative. A statisticoholic will usually discover this immediately.

Term: GBCW, GBDW, GBMF
Meaning: Good-bye-cruel-world, Good-bye-dear-world, Good-Bye-My-Friends. Is a final blog-suicide note  in which the owner of the post or the comment will declare that he's Done with this blogging thing or with this site. Vowing to never write again, or comment again. Usually other commenters or readers will jump in to either say why that person shouldn't leave. Or applaud the move. In affect inflating the persons ego. Who enjoys the added publicity and interest in his blog

Term: Atom, RSS
Meaning: These are methods to get the data only of the articles on a blog, without the additional decorating HTML. People can subscribe to Atom and RSS feeds and get a stream of articles or comments without receiving the full web pages.

Term: Meta, Meta-data, Meta-info
Meaning: Adding some HTML tags inside an entry or blog main site to indicate the type of content the site has. This helps indexers and search engines classify and find the blog

Term: Tags, Labels, Categories
Meaning: A way to add additional terms so online tools like Technorati can classify the entries based on the tags. Helps in Tag browsing

Term: Slashdotted
Meaning: Getting a huge number of hits from a major site to the point that the server/service/software are unable to deal with the traffic. (Eg When Bakkouz posted about photoshop with key-gen hack, he got slashdotted with 23000 hits on that article alone)

Term: StoryBlog, ScriptBlog
Meaning: A Blog dedicated to a Story or a Script (like Mosalsal). Where a writer or writers contribute and discuss the progress of the story/script. These can be Private blogs, or by invitation only blogs or public

Term: Dark Blog
Meaning: A hidden or private blog. not interested in the masses knowing about it

Term: Blog-arrhea
Meaning: A blog that spews a big number of posts a day (from Blog diarrhea)

Term: Comment-arrhea, comment-diarrhea
Meaning: A huge number of comments in response to a specific article

Term: Sleeper (article, comment)
Meaning: People will fall asleep because of it's length or boring content

Term: Microblog
Meaning: A method of blogging that uses very few words to answer the question: "What are you doing now", similar to Facebook status. Not considered real blogging by purists. But some people consider it fun. It resembles offering breadcrumbs to stalkers. All a person has to do is keep track of you twitter (a microblogging engine) updates and come and clobber you