Blog
Wikipedia defines a blog (short for weblog) as “a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order).” Blogs can be jointly authored by political campaigns, pressure groups and businesses, but the archetypal blog is an individual voice and it can be about anything.

Dave Winer, the software developer whose Scripting News is the longest-running blog on the internet, holds that ‘the first weblog was the first website’, that published in 1992 by the ‘father of the web’ Tim Berners-Lee, to keep interested parties up with what he was doing. A key feature was the presence of clickable links. You can read four of his posts for that year at www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/News/

But the more generally accepted view is that weblogs began when somebody coined the term ‘weblog’. That someone was Jorn Barger, who applied the term to his website Robot Wisdom in 1997, to describe his process of “logging the web”. (Barger has a perfect blogger makeup: he’s an expert on artificial intelligence and James Joyce, a veteran of the pre-blogosphere Usenet newsgroups and a slightly mad anti-Zionist.) Two years later, Peter Merholz shortened the word to “blog”; both a noun and a vowel.

Comments
The standard blogging packages all offer the ability for readers to post comments in a discussion thread attached to a particular post. This can be a great way of opening a debate and involving your audience, but it has its risks. If anyone else posts a defamatory or abusive message, you’re the publisher. You may want to set up a moderation system, so you can approve each comment before it is published. Act leader Rodney Hide (rodneyhide.com/Diary) approves comments on the move, via his mobile phone.

Blogroll
A column of blogs related to your sector, your mates’ blogs or just stuff you like. Reciprocal listing on other bloggers’ blogrolls is a cheap and effective way of marketing yourself.

RSS
Real Simple Syndication is the thing that makes sense of the burgeoning blogosphere. No one really has time to visit every blog they like on the off-chance there’s something new, but RSS feeds notify readers of new heads and even the entire post. You should have one on your blog and you should invite your readers to use it, because it will bring them back.

Blog swarm
Individuals — either with their own blogs, or posters to the comments sections in other blogs — focus on an issue with the intention of digging up facts or simply forcing it into the mainstream media as a story. Blog swarms start small but sometimes end up with people resigning. CNN lost its head of news, Eason Jordan, this year after a blogger at a (suppos-edly) off-the-record World Economic Forum seminar caught him apparently inferring that US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had targeted journalists. The swarm was angry.

Job-blogging
The delicate art of blogging about — or even from — work. Some companies (Microsoft, Google, the BBC) encourage staff to keep personal blogs, but within limits: a new Google employee was dismissed this year after letting go
company secrets in his blog.

Those in less liberal environments are more likely to be ‘dooced’ — fired because of the content (or even the mere existence) of their blog. Many job-bloggers — especially professionals — wisely shelter behind pseudonyms; the trick is to avoid blurting it out to the boss’s secretary after five drinks on a Friday evening.

Podcasting
A sexy name for what used to be called audioblogging. The thoughts and insights of the blogger are delivered not through text, but as a downloadable MP3. What makes podcasting special is that it uses RSS — so dedicated applications such as iPodder can keep track of new files and even, if you wish, download them automatically in the background — so you can load that motivational lecture onto your iPod and listen to it on the plane. The quality of the content is distinctly patchy at the moment, but both the BBC and the ABC have started making broadcasts available podcast-style, and the number of regular podcasts has grown from only 100 a year ago to more than 7,000. Part of the problem is that the user software has been terribly clunky, but Apple Computer’s launch of a podcast-enabled version of its iTunes application has fixed that.