blikis, phlogs, and moblogging

More and more people are getting online - not just to search for information but actually to create their own Net content. These latest uses of the Internet are rapidly spawning a host of new words. While many non-Netheads will probably have heard of blogs (personal websites similar to diaries) and bloggers (people who write blogs), Webophobes may not have come across wikis or blikis yet.

A wiki is a type of website that is developed collaboratively by a group of users, and can be easily added to or edited by anyone (known as 'open editing'). 'Wiki' is a Hawaiian word meaning 'quick' (when repeated it means 'very quick') and was first used in this sense in 1995 by the US computer programmer Ward Cunningham, who called his website the WikiWikiWeb. The best-known wiki is probably Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute articles to). A bliki (also known as a bloki) is a blog that can be edited like a wiki: after an article is posted to the blog, it can be added to by a group of users authorized to do so by the bliki's originator, or, in some cases, by anyone at all.

Blog itself (a shortening of weblog and first recorded in 1999) quickly became a verb (hence bloggers and blogging) and, as can be seen in bliki above, is now being combined with other words to create new blends and compound words, which are generating even more words in their turn. Here are just a few that have been spotted recently:

• blogdom/blogosphere/blogworld - all terms for the world of blogs and blogging.
• vlog (also called a video-blog) - a blog with video footage: this word's given rise to vlogger and vlogging.
• blogorrhea - the tendency to fill a blog with too much trivial material. The word is a humorous formation, from blog and the ending -rrhoea, which comes from Greek rhoia 'flow, flux' (as in diarrhoea) and is also associated closely with the established word logorrhoea meaning 'the tendency to talk too much'.
• blogroll - a part of a blog listing links to other blogs. Another word formed humorously from blog and roll (in the sense 'a list'), with the punning similarity to bogroll (toilet roll).
• phlog (shortened from and also called a photoblog) - a blog which includes photos, often those taken by a mobile phone. Phlog is also used to describe a blog which can be updated via a mobile phone using SMS or MMS. This kind of phlog is also known as a moblog. Both terms have generated related words such as phlogger and moblogging.

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