B
Blawg
A weblog that deals with legal issues, often written by lawyers or academics.

Blogdex
A project from MIT's Media Lab that regularly checks what weblogs are linking to, thus tracking information as it flows across the blogosphere. By going to the Blogdex front page you can see which links are most popular on weblogs at the moment. A high ranking on Blogdex is both an indicator that your weblog is getting lots of traffic, and also a guarantee that your weblog will gets lots of traffic, as readers click through from the Blogdex index.

Blogger
Blogger is both the truncated name for a weblogger, and the name of one of the oldest weblog publishing services, Blogger (read a review here). Blogger, the web service, is held in affection by many longer-term bloggers, despite its falling out of fashion, as the service was run for some time by only one person - Evan Williams - after the dot.com crash. You can read an Online interview with Williams from January 2002 here (A tale of one man and his blog). Blogger was subsequently bought by Google, the search engine, for an undisclosed sum.

Bloggerati
Big name bloggers who, by dint of their weblog's longevity and/or quality, and their propensity to champion and comment on the weblog phenomenon, have become well known among other bloggers. Derived from "literati".

Blogosphere
The world of weblogs or the community of bloggers, as in "the blogosphere is alive with the news of Saddam Hussein's capture". Some bloggers also refer to the blogging community as "Blogistan".

Blogroll
A list of links to other blogs, often included in a vertical column down one side of the weblog: usually a way of illustrating the blogs one reads or esteems.

C
Comments
A facility that allows weblog visitors to leave their comments on the author's views. Some weblog services, including Typepad, Movable Type and Userland, offer commenting as standard. Other services, including Blogger, do not have a comment facility built in, forcing users to use third party services including Blogback and enetation. Some webloggers feel a weblog is not complete without commenting being available, although some high-profile webloggers have been forced to remove the comment facility because of abusive or legally risky contributions from readers.

D
Dowdification
The practice of omitting a word or words from a quote, so as to completely change (or undermine) the meaning of the quote. This is often done to support the quoter's own purpose and, as noted by Samizdata, "both the term and the practice are often found in the Blogopshere". Named after New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, after an incident in the Spring of 2003. Read more here, from the Wall Street Journal.

F
Fisking
To "Fisk" a piece of work means to go through it point by point, often vehemently disagreeing with its contents. The term arose from such treatment meted out to the work of Independent journalist Robert Fisk, whose work has been deconstructed regularly by warbloggers.

G
Google bomb
Google bombing is a method of catapulting a website - often a weblog - to the top of a Google search for a given phrase, achieved by abusing a loophole in the search engine's algorithm. Because Google will often recommend sites which do not contain the exact phrase you are looking for, but have been linked to by sites that use that phrase, website owners found they could create pages full of links to their site, often using bizzarre and irrelevant keywords, to bring their sites to the top of certain searches.

L
Linklog
A weblog carrying only a simple list of interesting links, without extensive commentary or illustration. Sometimes a linklog will run alongside fuller journal entries or other commentary.

M
Moblog
A weblog created via mobile phone or personal digital assistant (PDA), rather than a computer. These typically feature photographs of the author's travels, and brief text commentary.

P
Permalink
Because a weblog's front page changes regularly, old posts eventually "fall off" the front page and go into the archives. To make it easier to link back to old posts, weblog services give each post its own unique URL. If you ever link to a specific weblog post, you should use this URL rather than simply "myweblog.co.uk", so readers will always be able to find the post to which you are referring. The permalink URL for a post can usually be found in a link next to the post, denoted by a #, "permalink" or "link".

Photoblog
A weblog composed mainly, or all, of photographs.

Ping
A ping is a way of finding out whether a specific IP address - either a computer or website - is accessible by sending message and waiting for a reply. Bloggers use pinging to let blog tracking services such as Weblogs.com that their weblog has been updated.

R
RSS
Experts differ on whether RSS stands for RDF Site Summary (RDF stands for Resource Description Framework), Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, but the meaning is the same. RSS is an XML format originally developed by Netscape that is used by many weblogs to syndicate their content. The Purple Pages has an excellent RSS FAQ if you want to find out more.

T
Technorati
Another web service that tracks the content of weblogs (see Blogdex.) Its search facility is particularly useful for webloggers anxious to see who is linking to their site, and what they're saying. The site also sports a top 100 weblogs, ranked by inbound links.

Trackback
A system devised by the people behind Movable Type to make it easier to track conversations between weblogs. So: I write something on my weblog. You want to respond on your weblog, so you write your piece, post it, and send a Trackback "ping" to my site to, in effect, say "hey, I've commented on your piece". At that point, my weblog automatically links to your comments. And so on.

Typepad
From the people who brought you Movable Type comes Typepad, which we review here. Launched in the summer of 2003, Typepad has been credited with bringing sophisticated weblog features to a less technically advanced audience.

W
Weblog
The definition of a weblog is, perhaps surpisingly, a controversial subject. We prefer the definition supplied by Bausch, Haughey and Hourihan in We Blog (Wiley, 2002): "At their core, weblogs are pages consisting of several posts or distinct chunks of information per page, usually arranged in reverse chronology from the most recent post at the top of the page to the oldest post at the bottom." Beyond that, there are lots of additional features, which may or may not be present: links, comments, a calendar, news, comment, a single author, multiple authors, whole communities, amateurs, professionals, and so on.

Warblogger
Veteran weblogger Dave Winer defines a warblogger thus: "A warblogger is a person who runs a weblog that started around, or was significantly influenced by the events of September 11 2001," which is as good a definition as we've found. The best known warbloggers are Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com and Andrew Sullivan.

X
XML
XML is a way of labeling online content to allow computers to understand better what that content is. In a weblogging context, XML underpins the RSS format, which is in turn used to distribute headline feeds to aggregators