In my time as a low-key blogger, I’ve come across a plethera of terms that are unique to bloggers. I thought I’d put together a list of terms and what they mean.
- Bleg – To use your blog to “beg” for something, be it information, money, or whatever.
- Blog – short for “web log”. It’s an easy way to get your views out there for others to read, and if you wish, comment on or discuss.
- Blogosphere – The blog world or community.
- Blogroll – A list of links on a blog to other blogs. Usually either blogs that the blog owner recommends, or a list of blogs written by readers of the blog in question.
- Comment Spam – unsolicited adverisements left in a blog’s comment section. This is done to increase the number of links, and thus the perceived relavency of a solicitor’s website. The more links refer back to a website, the higher it appears in the search engines.
- Commenter – someone who leaves comments on a blog.
- Flame – To post a hostile remark in order to incite an argument.
- Hat Tip – To tip your hat to another blogger. Usually as a way of acknowledging that you learned of the topic of your post on their blog.
- Moonbat – Someone who would be considered on the fringe of the political spectrum. Moonbats are usually outspoken, and tend toward activism. Considered by most to be “kooks”/”nuts”.
- Permalink – A link that brings you directly to the archived version of a blog post.
- Reciprocal Link – Linking to someone who links to you.
- Slashdotted – To have your site mentioned on Slashdot. For most, this means that they’ve not only been mentioned, but the traffic generated by the mention crashed their server or overloaded their internet bandwidth.
- Thread – In short, a conversation. Usually applies to forums or newsgroups, but can also apply to conversations in the comments section of a blog.
- Trackback – Similar to a comment. Rather than leaving a comment in the comments section, the commenter quotes or responds to the post on their own blog, and uses trackback to alert readers of the first blog to their post.
- Troll – Someone who comments on a blog specifically to get an angry response (just trying to piss people off.)
I had to look a few of those up myself, including bleg and moonbat. New terms pop up and seem to come out of nowhere.