Hi there

I hope you are doing great. Today I'm sharing some of the terminologies and their meaning used in web 2.0 and social media boom, particularly focused on their relation with development. The terminologies given here are commonly-used in Web 2.0 and social media. The glossary is not an exhaustive list and does not include more technical computing terms. I have adapted these terminologies from the e-book ‘What is Social Media?’ (Mayfield, 2008, p.34-35) and ‘Participatory Learning and Action’, (IIED and CTA, 2009, p.121-124).

Aggregator (see also RSS)

An aggregator (or ‘news aggregator’ or ‘feed reader) is a piece of software or online service that receives and displays multiple web feeds of syndicated web content such as news headlines or blog posts. An aggregator could be a website displaying the latest headlines from multiple other news websites or a feed reader application that a user downloads to run on their computer to enable them to subscribe to, and view, RSS feeds of the latest content from multiple websites without having to visit each website in turn.

Blog

Originally ‘web log’ a website where the most recent entries appear first, typically allowing users to subscribe to updates and to leave comments.

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Blogosphere

Blogosphere is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections. It is the perception that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social network.

Bookmarks, Bookmarking

Saving an item, page or website for future reference, increasingly via an online account such as del.icio.us. Works in a similar way to the ‘favourites’ feature of a web browser.

Communities

Online networks that exist around shared interests or shared content.

Content communities

Communities which organise around and share particular kinds of content. Popular content communities exist around photos (Flickr), bookmarked links (del.icio.us), news (Digg), videos (YouTube), documents (Scribd) and presentations (SlideShare).

Content Management System (CMS)

A server-based software used to publish, edit and control the workflow of content in a website. It integrates many functions that enhance web services and their interfaces can be freely customized. For example, web portals are structured using CMS.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing means to outsource a task to a crowd of undefined, generally large group of people. Commonly used in Web 2.0 projects such as citizen journalism where the input of individuals is solicited.

Folksonomy (see also Tags)

The term ‘folksonomy’ (combining the words ‘folk’ and taxonomy’) refers to a collection of online user-generated tags. Folksonomies are created collaboratively when people create and use tags to annotate and categorize content such as blog posts, photographs, web links and other web content. This bottom-up classification system has emerged from social tagging, also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, and social indexing.

Geotagging

Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, blog posts or RSS feeds. It is increasingly used to create visual maps of data through mash-ups.

Instant Messaging (IM)

A form of real-time communication via the internet between two or more people based on typed text, for example Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc.

Mash-up

A hybrid web application combining content from two or more different data sources, for example data added to Google Maps.

Metadata

Metadata is data about other data, from keywords in the html of a webpage describing the content, to information about the size of a picture or file. Tags are a form of metadata.

Micro-blogging

Instant publishing of bite-size amounts of content via a service such as Twitter, Jaiku, etc.

Open source software (OSS), also known as Free and open source software (FOSS)

Open source software (OSS) can be defined as computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that meets the Open Source Definition. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. OSS are typically free-to-use (for this reason, they are often referred to as FOSS).

Personalized start-page

Personal start-pages are web pages that allow users to create their own customized web page, integrating multiple RSS feeds and other social networking applications and widgets.

Podcast

A Podcast is a series of audio or video digital media files automatically distributed via the internet. A Podcast is distinguished from most other digital media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to and downloaded automatically when new content is added via a feed. Like the term broadcast, Podcast can refer either to the series of content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated.

Post

A post (or posting) refers to content that is uploaded to the internet. Typically, commentary written on blogs is referred to as a post.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

A method of subscribing to a site’s content and being alerted to new updates without visiting the site, either through the user’s web browser or an RSS aggregator (for example Bloglines, FeedDemon, etc).

Second Life

The best-known ‘virtual world’, in which users can move around and interact with one another and the environment as 3D characters (avatars).

Short Messaging Service (SMS)

Mobile phone text messaging service. Sending a text message via mobile telephone is known as Short Messaging Service.

Social bookmarks (see also bookmarks)

Social bookmarking is a web-based service to share internet bookmarks. Social bookmarking websites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links through the practice of folksonomy techniques. Since the classification and ranking of resources is a continuously evolving process, many social bookmarking services allow users to subscribe to web feeds based on tags, or a particular user. This allows subscribers to become aware of new resources for a given topic, as they are noted, tagged and classified by other users.