Useful Resources

Online Jargon

You have heard all these online terms but don’t know what they mean? Want to be able to talk the lingo and impress the people around you. Here are a couple of terms to help you out…

• Avatars:

  Graphical images representing people. They are what you are in virtual worlds. You can build a visual character with a body, clothes, behaviors, gender and name of your choice. This may or may not be an authentic representation of yourself.

• Blog:

  This is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.

• CMS: (Content Management System)

  Programs such as Wordpress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so chose.

• CSS: (Cascading Style Sheet)

  A stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language.

• Feeds:

  The means, by which you can read, view or listen to items from blogs and other RSS-enabled sites without visiting the site, by subscribing and using an aggregator or newsreader. Feeds contain the content of an item and any associated tags without the design or structure of a web page.

• Forums:

  A discussion area on websites, where people can post messages or comment on existing messages asynchronously – that is, independently of time or place time. Chat is the synchronous equivalent.

• Frames:

  Web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within its own frame. Frames are bad for SEO because spiders sometimes fail to correctly navigate them. Additionally, most users dislike frames because it is almost like having two tiny monitors neither of which shows a full page of information at one time.

• Groups:

  Collections of individuals with some sense of unity through their activities, interests or values. They are bounded: you are in a group, or not. They differ in this from networks, which are dispersed, and defined by nodes and connections.

• HTTP: (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)

  Communications protocol for the transfer of information on the intranet and the World Wide Web.

• HTML: (Hyper Text Markup Language)

  Directives or ‘markup’ which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.

• Landing Page:

  The page that a user lands on when they click on a link in the Search Engine Result Page.

• Link:

  An element on a web page that can be clicked on to cause the browser to jump to another page or another part of the current page.

• Micro – Blogging:

  Most commonly known as Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.

• ORS:

  Online Reputation Strategy

• PDF (Portable Document Format):

  A file format that has captured all the elements of a printed document as an electronic image that you can view, navigate, print, or forward to someone else. PDFs can be read by any computer without platform conflicts. To view a file in PDF format, you need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.

• RSS: (Really Simple Syndication)

  A family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format.

• Sentiment:

  The process of scoring mentions that have been returned for specified keywords in regards to a positive, neutral or negative sentiment.

• SERM: (Search Engine Reputation Management)

  Process employed by companies to proactively shield their brands from damaging content brought to light through search engine queries.

• SIM: (Social Influence Marketing)

  Social Influence Marketing is about leveraging social media at every stage of a marketing campaign, going beyond the life time of a campaign.

• SMO: (Social Media Optimization)

  Set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, adding a ‘Digg This’ button, blogging and incorporating third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides, galleries or YouTube videos.

• SMM: (Social Media Marketing)

  Website or brand promotion through social media.

• SNS: (Social Networking Site)

  Online places where users can create a profile for themselves, and then socialise with others using a range of social media tools including blogs, video, images, tagging, lists of friends, forums and messaging.

• Social Bookmark:

  A form of Social Media where user’s bookmarks are aggregated for public access.

• Social Media:

  Various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.

• Threads:

  Strands of conversation. On an email list or web forum they will be defined by messages that use the same subject. On blogs they are less clearly defined, but emerge through comments and trackbacks.

• UGC: (User Generated Content)

  Refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users.

• URL: (Uniform Resource Locator)

  The web address of a site or page.

• Widgets:

  Stand-alone applications you can embed in other applications, like a website or a desktop, or view on its own on a PDA. These may help you to do things like subscribe to a feed, do a specialist search, or even make a donation.

• Wiki:

  Web page – or set of pages – that can be edited collaboratively. The best known example is Wikipedia, an encyclopedia created by thousands of contributors across the world. Once people have appropriate permissions – set by the wiki owner – they can create pages and/or add to and alter existing pages.

• WWW: (World Wide Web)

  A system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet (Commonly shortened to the Web).

• XML: (Extensible Markup Language)

  General-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own elements.