Conversations on the Fringe

blog: Originally short for “weblog”, a blog is just a web page that contains entries in reverse chronological order, with the most recent entry on top. But blogging has taken off because the explosion in blogging software and services — like Blogger, TypePad and WordPress — has turned blogging into one of the easiest ways for people to maintain a constantly updated web presence. In addition to the classic text blog, we now have photo blogs (consisting of uploaded photos), audio blogs (a.k.a. “podcasts”) and video blogs (which consist of regularly uploaded video files).

blogroll: A list of recommended sites that appears in the sidebar of a blog. These sites are typically sites that are either on similar topics, sites that the blogger reads regularly, or sites that belong to the blogger’s friends or colleagues. The term “blogroll” also evokes the concept of political logrolling (when legislators promise to vote for one another’s pet bills) — which is not unlike bloggers’ habit of reciprocating links by posting links to blogs that link back to their own blogs.

bookmarking: is saving the address of a website or item of content, either in your browser, or on a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us. If you add tags, others can easily use your research too, and the social bookmarking site becomes an enormous public library. If groups agree on the tags they’ll use, it makes collaborative research much easier.

chat: is interaction on a web site, with a number of people adding text items one after the other into the same space at (almost) the same time. A place for chat – chat room – differs from a forum because conversations happen in “real time”, rather as they do face to face.

forums: are discussion areas on websites, where people can post messages or comment on existing messages asynchronously – that is, independently of time or place. Chat is the synchronous equivalent. Before blogs developed, email lists and forums were the main means of conversing online. Forum discussions happen in one place, and so can be managed and facilitated in ways that blog conversations can’t because these are happening in many different places controlled by their authors.

friends: on social networking sites, are contacts whose profile you link to in your profile. On some sites people have to accept the link, in others, not.

groups: are collections of individuals with some sense of unity through their activities, interests or values. They are bounded: you are in a group, or not. They differ in this from networks, which are dispersed, and defined by nodes and connections. Email lists and forums sit easily with bounded groups, blogs with networks – although the match with tools is not entirely clear-cut. A group may use a blog, and an email list may serve a network.

instant messaging: (IM) is chat with one other person using an IM tool like AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft Live Messenger, or Yahoo Messenger. The tools allow you to indicate whether or not you are available for a chat, and if so can be a good alternative to emails for a rapid exchange. Problems arise when people in a group are using different IM tools that don’t connect. One way around this is to use a common Voice over IP tool like Skype that also provides IM.

mashups: are the smart mixes that techies do to combine several tools to create a new web services.

newsreader:  A newsreader gathers the news from multiple blogs or news sites via RSS (see below), allowing readers to access all their news from a single web site or program. Online newsreaders (like Bloglines, Pluck, or Newsgator) are web sites that let you read RSS feeds from within your web browser. Desktop newsreaders download the news to your computer, and let you read your news inside a dedicated software program.

peer-to-peer: P2P refers to direct interaction between two people in a network. In that network, each peer will be connected to other peers, opening the opportunity for further sharing and learning.

photosharing: is uploading your images to a website like Flickr. You can add tags and offer people the opportunity to comment or even re-use your photos if you add an appropriate copyright license.

podcast: An audio blog typically updated weekly or daily. You don’t have to have an ipod to listen to a podcast; although you can download podcasts to an ipod, you can also listen to podcasts on a desktop computer, or many other mp3 players.

RSS: A format for storing online information in a way that makes that information readable by lots of different kinds of software. Many blogs and web sites feature RSS feeds: a constantly updated version of the site’s latest content, in a form that can be read by a newsreader or aggregator.

social bookmarking: The collaborative equivalent of storing favorites or bookmarks within a web browser, social bookmarking services (like del.icio.us or Furl) let people store their favorite web sites online. Social bookmarking services also let people share their favorite web sites with other people, making them a great way to discover new sites or colleagues who share your interests.

social networking: Social networking sites help people discover new friends or colleagues by illuminating shared interests, related skills, or a common geographic location. Leading examples include Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

tags: Keywords that describe the content of a web site, bookmark, photo or blog post. You can assign multiple tags to the same online resource, and different people can assign different tags to the same resource. Tag-enabled web services include social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us), photo sharing sites (like Flickr) and blog tracking sites (like Technorati). Tags provide a useful way of organizing, retrieving and discovering information.

web 2.0: The term itself originates from a several years-long discourse among techies about the evolution of Internet technology (Web 2.0 as a step up from Web 1.0). In fact the underlying technology driving the Internet and web browsing is nothing new. The purpose of the web was always to facilitate the sharing of information, and the fundamental standards and principles established for this decades ago still stand. But today Web 2.0 has come to represent a growing perception and excitement among investors, enthusiasts and practitioners that the promise of the Internet as a tool for collaboration and information sharing is now finally being delivered.

widgets: are stand-alone applications you can embed in other applications, like a website or a desktop, or view on its own on a PDA. These may help you to do things like subscribe to a feed, do a specialist search, or even make a donation.

whiteboards: online are the equivalents of glossy surfaces where you can write with an appropriate marker pen and wipe off later. They are tools that enable you to write or sketch on a web page, and as such are useful in collaboration online.

wiki: A collaboratively edited web page. The best known example is wikipedia, an encyclopedia that anyone in the world can help to write or update.  Wikis are frequently used to allow people to write a document together, or to share reference material that lets colleagues or even members of the public contribute content.