Hypercatalectic Mucro

hypercatalectic - Line (of poetry) possessing an extra syllable after the last, normal foot of the meter. Such lines can also be known as hypermetrical or extrametrical.

mucro - a sharp abrupt terminal point.

I didn't put in an interjection this time, because I don't think that my usual random word generator has enough to put one in the title of every post for very long, thus, I will save the uncommon interjections for when I deem them necessary.

Anyway, I decided to talk about blogs today, as I think the topic is very relevant. According to Wikipedia, a blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. I was wondering how I would define a blog before going to Wikipedia, and, I must say, I didn't think that the reverse chronological display of posts was a blog's most defining feature, but then again, with the many different types of blogs that exist today (even podcasts are types of blogs, apparently), maybe the ordering of posts is the only thing that they all have in common. To give you an idea of what I mean, here are some examples of what is considered a "blog."

1. The micro-blog, a blog in which each post is generally under 200 characters. These blogs are very convenient for those who have nothing better to do while they travel home from school on the subway, for instance, and happen to have a cellphone with text-messaging with them. While many different sites exist for making micro-blogs, the most commonly used today is the "my status" feature of Facebook.
2. The macroblog is a blog that can be edited by any member of its community. Some are restricted to certain groups of people, and some can be edited by anyone. I don't see the difference between a macroblog and a wiki, but apparently they are very different things.
   
3. MP3 blogs, a blog that has only songs, and a couple sentences explaining them, for posts.
4. Vlogs, a blog that has videos as posts. They have many vlog-resembling series of movies on YouTube.
5. Of course, podcasts (if you don't click anything, they are displayed in reverse chronological order on iTunes. I checked).
6. Photoblogs, in which each post is 1000 words long (hurray for lame jokes).
   
7. Spam blogs, blogs created by people with nothing better to do, that have many links and random commonly-searched words on them, in hopes that their blog will come up often in search engine results.

Now, of course, many people have other definitions of what a blog is. Many just call it a diary, but surprisingly, most say that by definition, a blog is often updated. I guess if the authors forget to post for a few days, their blog becomes something else. Interestingly, many sites also say that there are specific roles that people involved with a blog play. There were some obvious ones, like author and moderator, but then there are apparently also many different types of readers. My favorite:

blog lurker - a lurker is a person who reads discussions on a blog or other interactive system like chat room or forum, but rarely participates by contributing their comments.

I wonder if the person who came up with this name played Starcraft. They also have names for those who comment far too much, or make useless comments, but their names aren't even worth mentioning. Anyway, apparently there exists a commenting etiquette, that states that unless you comment often on blogs that you actively read, but only say productive (or non-spam) things, you are doing something wrong. There is even a scale of how bad some things are to do. For instance, if you ask questions about something answered in the blog post, it means that you either didn't read well, or are questioning the author's credibility, both of which you are not supposed to do, and thus it is very high on the rudeness scale. Answering rhetorical questions, and posting comments that are fewer than 4 words long are also very bad. However, reading three posts when they are published (aka not ones from far back in the blog's archive) and not commenting on them is bad too. I would give the link to the site with this scale, as it was rather funny, but I lost the link due to a power outage. I'll try to find it later.

Also, happy Winter-een-mass! May you find happiness in all the games you play. I celebrated today by playing a fair number of hours of Sonic 3, Guitar Hero 3, and Super Mario Galaxy, among others, and hope you are having fun celebrating as well. If you really want to get into the holiday spirit, but don't feel like gaming at the moment, some of these are pretty funny, especially the Angry Video Game Nerd movies, despite the great use of unnecessary vulgarity. Also, Tim Buckley from Ctrl-Alt-Del has started a WEMass story , so you should check it out too. You may want to read previous WEMass arcs to understand some of it, though. Especially who all the gods of gaming are.

I think that I will now end this post, because I feel like it. A plus tard.