Terminology

This is a preliminary set of definitions of the major parts of the blogging ecosystem. For each element, different terms have been used, some are clearly the most popular, and in other cases there is no apparent consensus. I will amend this piece based on the feedback I get.

• Blog Feed: A data feed produced by a blog. It is designated by a URL, and is usually in an XML-variant format like RSS.
• Feed: Any data feed in one of the feed formats like RSS. Blog Feed is a special case of a Feed.
• Blog Authoring Tool: The software which is used to write blogs. The users are people who want to create, write or contribute to a blog. (Alternative terms: )
• Blog Server: A special case of a web server which hosts one or more blogs. They can be read either by web browsers as HTML or by other software as Blog Feeds. Often these will include directories, search capabilities, notification mechanisms etc.
• Feed Aggregator: Used to organize and read a large collection of blogs. The users are people who want to read and follow a set of blogs. (Alternative terms: Blog Reader, Feed Reader)
• Feed Syndicator: A piece of network infrastructure which creates feeds from other feeds and other information. It might be selecting, merging, subsetting, translating, summarizing, etc.

[under construction. feedback very welcome!]