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A New Voices Glossary |
Baffled by buzzwords? Here’s a quick guide to frequently used Web terms.
Short for “weblog.” An online journal, allowing one or more users to quickly and easily post their writing, photographs, video and audio to a Web site. Each “post” of information generally has with a title, time and date. Many blogs have comments attached to each post, allowing those who read the blog to respond directly to the post’s contents. People who keep blogs are referred to as “bloggers,” while the blogging world is sometimes referred to as the “blogosphere.”
A program used to read Web pages. Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox and Safari are examples of popular Web browsers.
Also known as “message boards” or “forums.” A place for users to post their opinions about a site’s contents—or any topic under the sun—and have other users respond with their own comments. One or more moderators generally police a bulletin board, spurring discussion, quelling arguments and occasionally banning members whose posts become disruptive or abusive. Unlike blog comments, bulletin boards usually exist in a separate section of a Web site, apart from other content.
Like a Weblog, except it features posts by many different users, all of whom collaborate to create the blog’s overall content. Metafilter (http://www.metafilter.com) is a good example of a community blog; every day, the site’s various members post new links to other sites they?ve found on the Internet throughout the day.
A “platform” is the type of operating system a computer runs, i.e. Windows, Mac OS or Linux. Cross-platform programs work equally well no matter which operating system a user employs.
An electronic table that stores various types of information. For example, on a news site, a database might contain all the site’s news stories. Each entry in that database would contain the headline, byline, section and copy for a particular story.
Database-driven Web sites pull information automatically from databases to generate Web pages. Instead of creating many identical pages with different content, database-driven Web sites use a small number of template pages, and fill those templates automatically with information they draw from databases.
Short for Instant Message, a way to communicate through short text messages over the Web. Users register for a “screen name,” and then create a “buddy list” with the screen names of friends and family members. The list lets users know when their friends are online and available for chatting. Popular IM programs, or “clients,” include AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger. There is currently no single standard for sending and receiving instant messages; AOL users cannot exchange messages with MSN users, and vice versa.
Short for Internet Relay Chat. IRC users gather in chat rooms, or “channels,” to discuss various topics through short text messages. IRC’s popularity has waned in the face of simpler, more decentralized instant messaging programs.
An e-mail list, generally devoted to discussion of a specific topic: Star Trek, politics, pets, etc. Listserv members send their comments to a single automated address. That address then passes all those messages to every other member on the list. Think of it as the e-mail equivalent of a town hall meeting, where all the attendees sit in the same room and can all hear each other, but take turns speaking one at a time.
Open source software is free, available to anyone, and developed through collaboration among many programmers. When a programmer creates an open source program, he or she also makes that program’s source code—the “guts” of how it works—freely available. Other programmers can then study the code, learn from it, or make their own improvements to it. Popular open-source programs include the Linux operating system (http://www.linux.org), the PHP scripting language (http://www.php.net) and MySQL database software (http://www.mysql.com).
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a standardized way to broadcast your Web site’s content to a list of subscribers. Rather than visiting a Web site to see if it’s posted anything new, RSS users use newsreader programs to subscribe to a site’s RSS “channel,” receiving a regular stream of updated information from that site. For example, subscribers to a news site’s RSS feed will see an updating list of all the day’s news stories as they are posted. Web browsers have begun to incorporate the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds. For more information on RSS, visit http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/.
SMS stands for Short Message Service, a global standard for sending short text messages to and from cell phones, computers and other digital devices. SMS allows cellphone or computer users can send and receive text messages. SMS can also be used to send headlines, Web links and sports scores to cellphones, PDAs and other devices. For more information on SMS, visit http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/wire_sms/index.html.
On the Web, “traffic” refers to statistics about the people who visit a site, including how many people visited, where they came from, what pages they looked at, and how long they stayed. Traffic is an excellent barometer for the popularity of a site. Of the many components of traffic statistics, the most valuable is the number of “unique visitors”—a tally of how many different, specific individuals visited a site in a given period of time.
Wiki is an open-source technology that allows users to create Web pages directly from their Web browsers. No knowledge of HTML is required; Wiki sites use a simplified code to create links between pages. Wiki also enables the creation of collaborative Web sites, where literally anyone who visits the site can make changes to any given page. If a visitor to the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia spots an error in an entry, they can edit the page to correct the error and add their own information. More information is available at http://www.wiki.org.
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