Hi everyone

I hope the previous blog entry about web 2.0 and social media terminologies are fruitful to you. I'm writing some more terminologies and their meaning today. My next blog will be about user no. of Facebook in Nepal.

Social Media

Media that users can easily participate in, share and create content for, including blogs, social networks, wikis, forums and virtual worlds.

Social Networks

Channels through which individuals can interact socially. Successful online examples include Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc.

Social software

Social software is a type of software or web service that allows people to communicate and collaborate while using the application. Email, blogs,and even instant messaging are all examples of social software. Many advocates of using these tools believe that these create actual community,and have adopted the term ‘online communities’ to describe the social structures that they claim result.

Tag cloud (see also Tag)

A ‘tag cloud’ or ‘word cloud’ is a visual list of tags or keywords showing groups of user-generated tags or website content. A tag cloud links together a collection of other associated tags. More popular tags are shown using larger font sizes and/or different colors.

Tags, Tagging

Keywords that label pieces of content (for instance blog posts, bookmarks) and make them easy to organise and search.

Technorati Ranking

A blog’s authority, as measured by blog tracking website Technorati.

Trackback

A trackback (or linkback) function on a blog is to notify another blog that you are referencing them on your own blog.

Twitter

A micro-blogging service that distributes bitesized chunks of text across multiple platforms, including mobile, instant messaging and email. Messages are often status updates about what a user is doing.

User-generated content

The concept of enabling a community of users – not just individual authors - to create the content on a website, contribute to what is already there, govern it by determining its accuracy, usefulness, and relevance and ensure that the resource is updated as needed. User-generated content is typified by information resources such as Wikipedia or YouTube.com. On these websites, user-generated content is everything: without the users there is no content.

Virtual Worlds

An online environment in which people can interact with each other and the environment as 3D characters (avatars).

Vlogs (see also Blogs)

A form of blog that contains video content.

Vodcast

Video files that are published on the internet and can be subscribed to, a derivative of podcasts (audio files).

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

VoIP services are free or low-cost online platforms which enable you to make individual or conference ‘phone calls’ from one computer to another(referred to as PC2PC). Skype is one example of a VoIP service. See: www.skype.com

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design that facilitates communication, secure information-sharing, cooperation and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Sometimes referred to as the ‘read and write’ web, Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications. These include applications such as social networking websites, video and photo-sharing websites, wikis and blogs.

The term Web 2.0 was first used by Eric Knorr in December 2003 and became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changesin the ways software developers and end-users utilize the web.

With the first phase of the web, most people could only read information online. New Web 2.0 technologies now make it possible for most internet users e.g. to edit and create their own content on websites that incorporate these technologies. They allow non-web designers to put their own content (writing, audio, video, etc.) online easier than ever before.

They make content more portable than ever and easier to remix, mash together or reuse in a different context. Web 2.0 tools utilize this user-generated content and the economy of scale/network multiplier effect created to draw valuable connections between related users and content.

They make the discovery of new content more automated and relevant than ever before.

They have the potential to exponentially increase the amount of information that any of us are able to access, store and recall.

Web 2.0 tools

Tool is used here as shorthand for a computer software application and also for applications that are web-based. There are dozens of emergingfree or low cost interactive web applications and services (often referred to as the participatory web or Web 2.0). These can enhance the ways we create, share, and publish information. Examples of Web 2.0 tools include social networking websites, video-sharing websites, wikis, and blogs.

Web syndication

Web syndication is where material on one website is made available to multiple other websites or individual subscribers (using RSS or web feeds).

Web2forDev

Participatory Web 2.0 for development – or Web2forDev for short – is a way of employing web services to intentionally improve information-sharing and collaborative production of content for development. The distinction between Web 2.0 tools and Web2forDev is that Web2forDev isabout the active use of these tools in development. It is about how development actors can relate and connect to other stakeholders, produce and publish their own material, decide on levels of access to information and redistribute pieces of content released by others. Web2forDev is about integrating, combining, aggregating, generating, moderating and mediating development information, ideas and perspectives.

Widgets

Widgets are mini portable applications which can be easily added to a website to provide additional functionality and dynamic content. Widgets can also be combined to create new functionalities. Many blog platforms, social networking websites and personalized start pages provide libraries of widgets for their users to pick and choose from.

Wiki

A wiki is an online collaborative workspace. A wiki is a website that allows users to add, remove, edit and change content. It also allows for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website, or to certain specific wiki sites, e.g. encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.