Newsweek has just come out with an article all about blogs and their growing influence in the world of ideas. I guess this means blogs are really, truly in the mainstream now. What’s interesting, though, is that two of my coworkers in the past week have asked me what a blog is. And I work at a hip interactive communications agency! So, when I read the article, I tried to see it through the eyes of someone like my mom, someone who isn’t exactly up on the latest tech lingo. (No offense, Mom.) While the writer makes a half-hearted effort to explain some of the concepts discussed in the article, I’m afraid a lot of people are going to read it the way Charlie Brown heard his teacher: “Wha waah wha WAAH WAAH waah.” Granted, there’s a nice definition of blog in the first paragraph:

A Weblog, or blog, is a personal Web site where somebody self-publishes an electronic journal, often linking to other things on the Web that strike the author’s fancy.

But the article fires off so much techno-jargon that the casual, non-geeky reader will probably run for cover before getting to the end of it. Here’s a little list of techie words in the article. Which ones could you define? Which ones are you even familiar with?

• Weblog
• blog
• blogging
• blogger
• blogosphere
• blogspace
• alpha blogger
• A-listers
• cross-link
• podcast
• podcasting
• audio feeds
• geekdom
• newbie

Side note: The next time I feel bad about how much time I spend on the internet, I’m going to remember this: All of this takes time: Scoble spends two hours daily writing his Weblog and three more hours reading hundreds of other blogs in search of fresh ideas and nifty software innovations.
[Read the NewsWeek article]