FEBO’s Definitions

FEBO Consulting’s Definitions

It’s a plain fact: Entrepreneurs need a handle on technology–everything from hardware and networking to executing transactions in cyberspace. The following glossary of terms, care of FEBO Consulting, aims to give entrepreneurs and their non-tech employees the vocabulary to make smart technology decisions and purchases, communicate more effectively with in-house IT staff and, ultimately, please their customers.

Canonical Url

What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway? A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls: * www.Febo-Consulting.com * Febo-Consulting.com/ * www.Febo-Consulting.com/index.html * Febo-Consulting.com/home.asp But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Social Networking

The process of creating relationships between a user and other people based upon some formal social graph. Social networks can be thought of as communities based upon interest or commonality that use the Internet to connect the people of the network, typically including points of presence (avatars), blogs, Web forums and microformats.

LinkedIn

One of the first business-oriented social networking companies, founded in 2002 and currently supporting more than 24 million registered users across 150 industries. LinkedIn takes advantage of the “six degrees of separation” concept first proposed by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, such that any given user is at most just six personal connections away from any other business person.

Flickr

The largest photography social networking site on in the Internet. Flickr has more than 2 billion photographs online, with 3 million to 5 million new photographs added daily. Vancouver-based Ludicorp started the service in 2004, and Yahoo! acquired it in 2005.

Instant Messaging

Any system that allows instantaneous person-to-person conversations over a network, and has its root in 1960s early Unix chat systems. While most instant-messaging systems have, in the past, been formed across proprietary networks, many IM conversations today take place using the open XMMP/Jabber protocol and can take place between different commercial networks.

Buddy List

A collection of friends and contacts names and Web links that are usually stored on a central database on the Web. While initially developed for Instant Messaging services, buddy lists have become an integral feature of most social networking services.

Social Graph

The graph (or map) of the relationships that a given individual has within a larger social network. Social graphs can be complex, multidimensional structures based on criteria such as profession, income, gender, age and so forth, and underlay many social networking services, including MySpace, Linked In and Facebook.

Short Message Service (SMS)

A microblogging format devised initially for use with cellphones, though its use has expanded to other networks as well. SMS, or text messaging, makes it possible for both person-to-person communication and broadcast (e.g., Twitter-like) communication. The abbreviated texting forms and use of smileys and other letter-graphs have made possible an entire subculture (predominantly of teenagers) communicating without the use of vowels or formal grammar.

Blog (Short for Weblog)

An article published via either a content management system or through an application to a specialized Web server to appear on the Internet. Blogs cover myriad topics, from political commentary to technical discussions to personal journals and even weather reports. The term blog also refers to a collection of such articles available from a given “blog site.”

Microblogging

A form of blogging involving very short messages (around 140 characters) that can inform people of instantaneous updates of content without creating full blogs. Twitter is perhaps the archetypal microblogging format, though competitors such as Jaiku and Pownce are expanding microblogging with file transfers and event invitations.

Blogroll

A linked list of bloggers that appear on a blog site, typical as a recommendation by the blogger of those bloggers he is most influenced by. Blogrolls are often specified in the outline processor markup language.

Blogosphere   

The collection of all of the blogs currently published on the Web, along with the infrastructure that publishes them. According to Blogscope, there are currently 30 million blogs with 140 million posts on the Web, as of October 2008.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The process of configuring Web content in order to gain the highest potential rankings for a given search engine. While early SEO systems involved simple keyword matches, SEO has evolved considerably, to the level of performing semantic searches on content, optimizing the specific layout of a page to make its terms more indexable, and using complex mathematical algorithms to better match anticipated search engine behaviors.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary, or Rich Site Summary)

One of the earliest syndication feed formats. While the original specification was created by Netscape in order to promote “Push” computing in the late 1990s, the format fell into disuse with the collapse of Netscape and was picked up by Dave Winer of Radio Land, who introduced it as the primary format for his early prototype “blogging” engine. RSS actually describes a family of different formats, with the most recent being RSS 2.0. An alternate proposal, RDF 1.0, was pushed by the early blogging community, and laid the foundation for the more recent Atom syndication format.

News Feed (Syndication Feed)

A document that contains both information about the provider of the feed and a collection of entries, each of which provides publishing information about a given blog or similar article, including summary and categorization information. Feeds are the messaging system for Web 2.0, providing enough information to identify newly published content on the Web for news readers and similar specialized applications.

Atom Feed

A syndication feed format first proposed by Sam Ruby in 2003. It was designed to work better with XML-structured content as well as HTML or text content, and includes category, publication and summary information.

Atom Publication Protocol (AtomPub)

A set of standards that define how Atom feeds can be used to publish blog content and similar data to the Web, although it is also being used increasingly to build applications that treat the Web like a database.

Aggregator

A web application or program that retrieves news (syndication) feeds from other sources and combines them, potentially sorting them by date, title, author or topic.

Tagging

The process of adding categorical information (usually one word or simple two-word phrases) that identifies some aspect of a Web resource. For instance, a picture of a parakeet may include tags for “parakeet,” “bird,” “photograph,” “Tweety” and so forth. Tagging is used both for search engine optimization and for building Web navigation systems, and may either be fixed (the terms in a vocabulary don’t change) or dynamic (users or moderators can add terms to the vocabulary).

Microformats

A form of tagging by adding attributes to HTML elements that provide some underlying metadata about the element. For instance, one form of microformatting would be to add business-card information, such as e-mail addresses or business phone, to a person’s name. Microformatting code can then be viewed (or used to perform other actions) with the appropriate software.

Syndication

A syndication feed for a Web or blogging site contains recent changes (new articles, revisions to existing articles, additional media and so forth) that is read by a syndication client. A syndication client reads the feed and presents a list of the new and changed articles, frequently with publication information and abstracts, to the user of the feed, along with links to the actual articles themselves that the user can click on to load into their syndication viewer.

Podcast/Vidcast/Vlog

A specialized form of blog post that points to a streaming media file instead of a Web page. Podcasts (audio files) take their name from the Apple iPod. Vidcasts or Vlogs are the video equivalent of podcasts.

OPML

The Outline Processor Markup Language, an XML language used in conjunction with Web 2.0 sites in order to provide lists of related links (such as a blogroll) or an index of relevant references (such as a glossary of terms).

ZINE

A zine (an abbreviation of the word fanzine, or magazine; pronounced /ˈziːn/ “zeen”) is most commonly a small circulation publication of original or appropriated texts and images. More broadly, the term encompasses any self-published work of minority interest usually reproduced via photocopier on a variety of colored paper stock. A popular definition includes that circulation must be 5,000 or less, although in practice the significant majority are produced in editions of less than 100, and profit is not the primary intent of publication.

Web Crawler

A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms[1] or Web spider, Web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutter[2]. This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Crawlers can also be used for automating maintenance tasks on a Web site, such as checking links or validating HTML code. Also, crawlers can be used to gather specific types of information from Web pages, such as harvesting e-mail addresses (usually for spam).