Yesterday the nice folks at Daily Blog Tips posted a glossary for bloggers. Unfortunately, they got a lot of it wrong. Below are my revisions.
A-List: That’s “A” for “Arianna,” as in “Huffington.” A-List Blogs are those with more power and prestige than others. They’re not bad people or anything, but that Dooce lady scares me, and I think I once saw Seth Godin eat a bug.
Akismet: A popular plug-in for WordPress blogs which automatically blocks comment spam, thus eliminating what is often the most interesting part of the conversation.
Archive: That special place on a blog where posts which have seldom been read are kept so that they may be more thoroughly ignored in the future.
Blog: That which was formerly achieved with a brick wall and a can of spray paint, and which is now affected with a file transfer protocol client and pixels.
Blogosphere: A sort of digitized English soccer riot, but without the respect for decorum.
Blogroll: A list of websites a blogger keeps in the hope that they will one day send him backlinks.
Digg: A mysterious icon at the bottom of this post with no known function. There are no reports to suggest that anyone has ever dared to click it.
Domain: Given the bleak and solitary nature of blogging, and considering the Seinfeldian sense of the word, a “domain” is that which a blogger spends many, many, many hours attempting to “master.”
Feedcount: The total number of RSS subscribers to a given blog (e.g., in the present instance, zero).
Google Analytics: Pornography for webmasters.
Niche: That designated subject which is officially neglected, often for weeks, while an author posts about politics.
Page View: What a blogger gets when a reader looks at his blog once. If that same reader looks at the blog again, the blogger gets a second Page View. And so on. Are we going too fast for you?
Pligg: Please. Somebody just made that word up. For crying out loud, stop wasting everybody’s time.
Splog: The hazy toxic smoke often seen polluting the skies above Splos Angeles.
Squornk: See? I can make up words too.
Technorati: A website that, theoretically, ranks blogs according to the number of links they receive from other websites. We say “theoretically,” because to date, no one has ever been able to get a Technorati page to load.
Twitter: The world’s largest 24-hour online ADHD support group.
Unique Visitors: People who visit your website who, for the purpose of web statistics, are deemed exactly as important as, and who are therefore considered interchangeable with, any other individual visitor to your site. Hence “Unique.”
WordPress: Blogging software developed by people who are probably having second thoughts now that they know it was used to compose this glossary.
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June 20, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Random Kath
Yay! Wonderful return to form, my dear.
I didn’t think Pligg and Splog were words either . . . I guess people have just given up on trying to create useful, intuitive names for things . . .
Your blogroll and your categories have disappeared in this iteration of the blog - no grumbles, just noticing . . .
June 20, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Jerry Thomas
I ditched the categories and the blogroll for now. There still aren’t that many posts here for people to get lost trying to find things, and I was trying to get the ads up higher on the page, just to see what happens.
Some day I’ll have more control over where and what and how much gets placed on these pages. For now I’m just sort of shoving things around, sorta like trying to do surgery while wearing mittens…