ConverStations: Glossary of Blogging and Social Media Terms

This is part of a series of posts (and a project-in-progress), compiled as a glossary of terms and phrases used in blogging and social media, that will continually be added to and modified.

SEO: Acronym for Search Engine Optimization A good beginner's guide to SEO can be found at SEOmoz.

Sidebar:A column (or multiple columns) along either or both sides of a blog site's main content area. The sidebar is often includes contact information of the author, the blog's purpose and categories, links to archives, honors and other widgets the author includes on the site.

SMO: Acronym for Social Media Optimization, a term coined by Rohit Bhargava

Spambot - automatic software robots that post spam on a blog (h/t Barbara Ling)

SOB: A badge of honor in the spirit of community and knowledge sharing. Created by Liz Strauss at Successful (and Outstanding) Blog(gers). A complete directory of SOBs.

Social Bookmarks: A method for Internet users to store, search, organize, and most importantly - share web pages. Two favorites are Delicious and StumbleUpon. For a great video on how social bookmarking works, check out CommonCraft's Social Bookmarking in Plain English.

Social Media: The tool set (including blogs) which everyone can use to publish content to the web. This can include audio, video, photos, text, files...just about anything. And these days, everyone is a content producer.

Splog: Nickname for Spam Blogs, or blogs not providing their own or real content. Sploggers use automated tools to create fake blogs full of links or scraped content from other sites in order to boost search engine results.