Book #2 Glossary Review

Poliblog? You’re putting Steven Taylor’s blog in the glossary?

Seriously, though, I assume you mean it as a word for “a blog that covers politics,” but I have only ever seen the word used that way once, ever, just recently. On the other hand, I have seen the Poliblog manage to get a newspaper to change the name of a blog they started without politely Googling first to see if the name was already taken.

Oh, and please please please emphasize that a post is a post, sometimes also called an entry, and is a subcomponent of a blog, which is made up of posts. A post should never be called a “blog.” Calling a post a blog screams “I am a total newbie who leaped into blogging without paying as much attention to blogging as I might have beforehand,” or else it screams “I am a celebrity or journalist blogger who has no clue about real blogging even if I have been doing it for quite a while, so I will use whatever terminoligy I imagine to be correct and not care if I sound like a total moron by doing so, since people will read me anyway because I am a celebrity or a journalist with an existing following that didn’t necessarily have to be built via blogging itself.”

Please? If it saves one person from sounding foolish, it will have been worth it. And it is not merely an indicator of blogging newbieness, but of internet newbieness. The term post for a blog descends neatly from the word post to a newsgroup, post to a mailing list, or even post to a (*shudder*) web-based forum or “board’ (it’s always a kick when someone jumps onto a newsgroup and refers to it as a “board,” in similar newbie fashion).

I assume you will have the distinction between blog the noun and blog the verb covered, so the importance of making sure people don’t equate “blog” with a post that is on a blog. Nobody would ever post to a newsgroup, or read a post on a newsgroup, and refer to the post as “newsgroup.” “Yeah, I wrote a long newsgroup about that new Jeremy Wright book on the business books newsgroup.” Sounds silly. And so does “I wrote a blog about Jeremy Wright’s new book on my blog.”

Okay, going away now…

Yeah, entry = post. I use both, but use the word post preferentially. If you have never encountered someone using the noun “blog” to mean the noun “post” or “entry,” you’ve missed how jarring it looks. I was railing against the use of blog = entry = post, not entry = post.

It’s kind of like that it’s versus its thing, the way it jams on the reading brakes and causes a mental fender bender for me, only far more so. I’ve almost given up on ever seeing people use it’s only when they mean “it is” and never otherwise.

I have no idea what other shortened term I would use for political blog. Except for here and one other time in roughly the past week, I have only ever seen political blog in full as two words. At least the urge someone might have to shorten it to poliblog as a generic word doesn’t sound silly the way “pressies” for presents and “addy” for address do. Heck, pressies isn’t even shorter, so why…

But I digress.

The list looks good, by the way, apart from poliblog giving me pause. I’d have to think long and hard as to whether anything might be missing. You could include carnival, roundup, linkfest, come to think of it. I like to think I did a good job defining carnival at thecotc.com, from the perspective of running one of the oldest and most successful ones, and having been largely responsible for inspiring multiple carnivals and the widespread adoption of the word “carnival” in the names of most of them.

Let you know if I think of more terms…