UNI Communicators' Forum

Glossary: Glossary

AJAX

Asynchronous Java And XHTML. A collection of programming technologies popular with Web 2.0 services as they allow users to interact with a page without having to reload the page. If you've used a Google service and seen a box of text or form expand suddenly on the page when you click it, you've probably used AJAX without realising.

Apache

Open source web server software - it allows a computer to serve pages to users over the internet. The most popular choice for web servers.

API

Application Programming Interface. A common feature of Web 2.0 services, this is a set of rules allowing data to be repurposed in other sites. For example, the flickr API allows other sites to display photos stored in flickr.

beta

A version of a service which is ready for the public to test out, but not fully guaranteed to work flawlessly. Web 2.0 services are sometimes said to be in perpetual beta, where they regularly release new features and tune them as they go, with the service users acting as testers.

blog

A blog, or weblog, is an online journal, reverse-chronologically ordered and maintained with an ultra-simple and generally free content management system. Often blogs allow users to add their own comments to entries, establishing a dialogue with readers.

blogger

Someone who maintains a blog. blogger is also the name of the most popular free blogging software. www.blogger.com

blogosphere

The collective term for all blogs and bloggers as a community. As many blogs allow comment and reciprocal linking, they form a very loose and informal network. Powerful concepts and stories can spread around the blogosphere quite quickly.

bluetooth

Content Management System

Software which automates many of the technical and organisational tasks involved in running a website.

del.icio.us

A popular social bookmarking service. del.icio.us lets users store their favourite links and view links that interest their friends.

Digg

Digg is a user driven social content website. Users submit links to stories that interest them. After they submit content, other people read submissions and 'Digg' what they like best. If the story receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page of Digg.com and receives huge traffic. You can Digg any blog posts on this site by clicking the button below the post (you will need a Digg.com account for this)

Drupal

A popular open source Content Management System, especially geared towards running community sites. This site is powered by Drupal. www.drupal.org

facebook

Very popular Web 2.0 social networking service. facebook is largely popular with students and young people, but has started to grow beyond this with many political and campaign groups getting involved. The site lets members locate old friends and make new contacts, form groups to discuss particular issues, and organise real-world meetings.

flame

A needlessly aggressive comment or complaint in reply to postings or other comments.

flickr

A popular web 2.0 service. allows users to store, categorise, annotate and share photos. The flickr API allows photos to be used on different websites. www.flickr.com

FTP

FTP or file transfer protocol is the way data can be transferred from a local machine to a remote server. There are a number of different programs that can do this for you such as Filezilla, an open source solution and commercial tools such as Cute FTP and WS-FTP.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language. A simple programming language for defining the format of a web page.

Mashup

A service provided by mixing together other web services so that the combined product adds value in its own right.

MySpace

A very popular social networking site. It combines simple blogs with networking tools for finding friends and people with similar interests, and getting in touch with them. Particularly popular with kids and musicians, thanks to its range of tools for categorising and sharing music.

n00b

Somebody new to a particular system. From gaming and hacker usage, where words are simplified and numbers replace many letters to make a kind of code that is hard for outsiders to read. Therefore a new user, or "newbie" becomes "noob" or "n00b".

Open Source

A loose volunteer-led movement, which aims to collaborate on new software, to be distributed freely and amended further by others to meet their needs. There are open source alternatives to many commercial packages.

php

"Hypertext Preprogrammer". A server-side programming language for creating dynamic web sites and applications, popular with the open source movement.

Podcasting

A technology to let users subscribe to regular updates of audio files, which are automatically downloaded onto a music player to listen to later.

RSS feed

Really Simple Syndication. An XML-based format that lets users subscribe to regular updates from a site's content. These updates can be read through a web service or a special tool called a feed reader. For example, in the left bar you can see the RSS feed link for the latest updates to this site.

Second Life

A 3D virtual world, where over 6 million registered users are able to meet, chat, and create anything they want. See www.secondlife.com

tagging

Rather than adopt a fixed set of categories to file their content, many community sites let users choose their own 'tags' to attribute to the content. Individual users may not choose the best categories but the idea is that thousands of people acting together will produce a better result when averaged out than one expert categorising everything - an idea known as 'the wisdom of crowds'.

troll

A trouble maker who intentionally causes controversy or outrage in an online forum or comment space, in order to disrupt the conversation for their own amusement.

Twitter

Microblogging service, which allows users to post regular two-line notes to a blog, keeping friends up to date with what they're doing, often more than once a day. Users can get the notifications by mobile phone text message, by RSS or the web, and subscribe to updates from as many of their friends as they like.

W3C

World Wide Web Consortium. A non-profit organisation set up with academic and industry backing to encourage common standards in good practice future development for the Web.

Web 2.0

A vague catch-all term for a new generation of web sites, which share some or all of a set of modern traits: Free exchange of data between sites, and creative re-purposing of other sites' data; content generated by large numbers of users; continual, iterative redevelopment; use of 'open source' technologies; provision of web based services, a similar, simple, aesthetic. The "2.0" part is meant to signify the way in which computer software versions are named, meaning the first comprehensive revision of a product.

Wi-Fi

Wireless internet connection. Uses radio signals to transmit data from your device, over a short distance to a hub, which is connected to the internet.

Wiki

A type of website that can be easily edited by anyone, to produce a collaborative work.

Wikipedia

The most popular example of a wiki. Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit or add to. The result is a comprehensive and mostly accurate tool. www.wikipedia.org

XHTML

eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language. A development from HTML, this markup language conforms to XML syntax, so can be analysed by a web service to extract and use the relevant data in a uniform way.

XML

eXtensible Markup Language. This is a markup language designed to define the important data in a piece of information on the web, and share it with other services in a meaningful way.

YouTube

Popular Web 2.0 video sharing site. YouTube allows users to upload, view and comment on video files. www.youtube.com