Workshop Definitions

Autodiscovery (also autodetection) – web browser’s ability to detect available RSS feeds on a webpage, usually indicated with an RSS/XML icon showing up at the end of the browser URL address bar; can click that icon to add the feed to your RSS reader.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript & XML) - web programming that is influencing the development of many Web 2.0 applications; an example of AJAX at work is Google Maps.

Badge – In some Web 2.0 sites, another name for the widget that allows you to display recently added or random items in your account (bookmarked sites, photos, etc.) elsewhere like a blog or webpage.

Blog – a website where you can use forms to post content ("entries") that appear in reverse chronological order, using databases, scripting, templates and style sheets to automate much of the process--including the archiving of older content; a web application that allows you to publish and archive content with little-to-no web programming or design experience.

Blog Administrator – the one who controls the blog: invites and (un)invites people to post, controls comment settings, modifies the template, style sheets, and page elements.

Blog Poster/Contributor – someone who has access to post entries to a blog, and to go back and edit them; usually invited to contribute, and does not have administrative rights by default.

Blogroll - a list of other blogs you read, posted as a collection of links on your blog.

Bookmarklet – a widget provided on a website that you place on your bookmark bar or in your IE favorites, often created by a Web 2.0 product provider to facilitate your ability to use their service (like adding a webpage to your social bookmarking account)

Comments – feedback for a blog entry; settings often need to be modified to reduce or eliminate spam.

Domain Mapping – using your own registered domain (URL) to publish a blog or wiki while using a hosted blog or wiki service for the actual posting and management.

Enclosure – the link in the podcast RSS feed to the actual media file.

Extension – a widget created as an add-on for a browser, most commonly Firefox; often more powerful than bookmarklets, but may be harder to install on computers with tight administrative control.

Folksonomy – user-generated collection of tags (taxonomy) on a social bookmarking or media file-sharing site; unlike a controlled vocabulary environment, synonyms and word variants like plurals exist independently in a folksonomy and are not combined or mapped

Hosted Blog – a blog maintained on a third-party domain (blogspot.com) as opposed to downloading the blogging software to maintain the whole thing on your own website; some offer a domain or custom mapping option.

Hosted Wiki – a wiki maintained on a third-party domain (pbwiki.com) as opposed to downloading the wiki software to maintain the whole thing on your own website; some offer a domain or custom mapping option. AKA “wiki farm”

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) - the original markup language of websites; the series of tags that give rise to lists, tables, frames, hyperlinks, paragraphs, linebreaks, and let you change text by size, color, font, bolding, italics....

JavaScript – programming language heavily used in Web 2.0 technologies; RSS feeds can be converted into JavaScript to be displayed as headlines on blogs, webpages, etc.

Mashup – combining web applications to create new ways of combining and repurposing content.

Page Elements – umbrella term for the non-posting content of a blog: recent posts, archive, category list, calendar, blogroll, RSS reader/feed options, free text, and widgets.

Permalink - the unique URL for a particular blog entry, so you can refer back to it or direct others to it by email or your blog.

Podcast – one in a series of media files that can be distributed with an RSS feed, analogous to a blog—with each entry an MP3 or another media file; podcasting is the act of recording these files for RSS syndication; podcast feeds can be captured in ordinary RSS readers or iTunes.

RSS Feed (also Atom, webfeed, etc.) - XML files that push/deliver content from blogs, news sites, journals and other web sites without the user having to check those sites repeatedly for the new content; there are several RSS specifications (1.0, 2.0), as well as Atom. For wikis, e-mail notifications might be preferable. RSS feeds can also deliver media content (----casting).

RSS Reader - an application that allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds of those websites; the reader checks the sites for updates and brings the new content back for you to read, with links back to the original site.

Sandbox - a place on your website, internal or external, to play with and test out new tools and technologies.

Style Sheet – the presentation elements of a website, separated from the structural elements--often placed on a separate webpage; a way to designate universal style commands instead of using repeated HTML tags. May also be referred to as CSS (cascading style sheet), and the ability to customize the CSS in a blog or wiki environment depends on the software and level of access.

Social Bookmarking – Saving and sharing your webpage/website bookmarks with others by creating a public, online version of a browser bookmark collection; social bookmarking sites allow users to tag what their adding to the collection, encouraging discovery by tag as well as by user; annotation and highlighting features may also be available. Variations include social citation and social clipping/annotation tools.

Social Software – broadly, any web site/service that allows, facilitates and encourages sharing and collaboration. Examples include social bookmarking and resource sharing sites like del.icio.us and flickr, document collaboration sites like Google Docs, and social sharing/connecting sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Syndication – making web content available as an RSS feed.

Tag Cloud – visual representation of a folksonomy, with the most popular tags larger and bolder.

Tags – the words and phrases selected by the user to describe a website or webpage they are bookmarking, or file they are uploading to a media sharing site; since there’s not attempt to control or organize the tags, it’s common to see word variants (model, models, modeling), synonyms, and related words among the tags.

Trackback – usually part of blog entry footer, tracks who has linked to that entry.

Template – the framework of the blog that controls things like header and footer information for each entry, as well as the page elements; may also include the style elements if not included separately; the amount of access you have to the template depends on the blogging software, but you can often make changes to the template using drag-and-drop options and not going "under the hood."

“Under-the-Hood” – Teri’s expression for getting to the raw markup code (template) and style sheets of a blog, where you can make handcoded changes; not every blogging option allows even the administrator to access this level.

Web 2.0 - the ubiquitous phrase that has come to define internet tools and technologies that emphasize collaboration, sharing, and communicating in a user-centered environment; includes tools like blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, folksonomies, Skype, Flickr, YouTube. (see Tim O'Reilly's article: Levels of the Game, for some additional distinctions among these and other Web 2.0 tools).

Widgets – enhancements created by third parties that you can use to add features or functionality to your blog such as a search engine; this is often a chunk of code that you can copy or insert easily.

Wiki – web software that allows multiple users to add, edit, delete, and organize content on the web in real time

• Notification – alerts of pages being updated, either e-mail or RSS feeds.

• Page – a unit of content in a wiki. Pages can be created using the wiki’s “New Page” feature, then edited, linked to and from other pages within the wiki, and even deleted. Instead of pages being organized into folders like a typical website, each page is simply an extension of the wiki homepage (http://name.wiki.com/page)

• Page History (also Revisions or Changelog) – the ability to access the previous saved versions of a wiki page. Various versions can be compared to each other, and an older version can be set as the current copy.

• Recent Changes – a more macro- version of Page History, this allows you to see a list of pages in order of the ones most recently updated.

Wiki Farm – another name for a company that hosts blogs on their server (pbwiki.com),

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Editor – The create/edit post interface that allows you to add “HTML” elements to your blog post without knowing the actual HTML tags required, including some or all of the following: tables, lists, images, hyperlinks, blockquoting and text alignment, font changes, color elements; may also include a spell-checker.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) – the markup language of RSS feeds; similar to HTML in that content is framed by tags (author, title, date, etc.) and an intermediate application is used to read the content—like using a web browser to read HTML pages.