Web 2.0 glossary
.1.3 | No Comments »
March 1st, 2006 by Alex
I’m looking forward to the upcoming Nten conference, where I’ll be part of a panel on Blogging, tagging, flickring for the cause. As background info for Nten participants, I put together the following glossary of “Web 2.0″ terminology.
What’s Web 2.0? Well, it’s really just a buzzword summing up the latest generation of Internet technology — a generation that encompasses the tools and technologies described below.
aggregation: Gathering information from multiple web sites, typically via RSS. Aggregation lets web sites remix the information from multiple web sites, for example by republishing all the news related to a particular keyword.
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.
mashup: A web service or software tool that combines two or more tools to create a whole new service. A leading example is ChicagoCrime, which merges Google Maps with the Chicago police department’s crime tracking web site to offer a map of crime in different parts of Chicago.
moblogging: Short for mobile blogging, moblogging refers to posting blog updates from a cell phone, camera phone or pda (personal digital assistant). Mobloggers may update their web sites more frequently than other bloggers, because they don’t have to be at their computers in order to post.
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.
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 favourite web sites online. Social bookmarking services also let people share their favourite 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 Friendster, LinkedIn, and 43people.
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.
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.
How to raise a gay-friendly child
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June 7th, 2005 by Alex
Jennifer Gerarda Brown has posted a great set of tips on how to raise a gay-friendly child on the Lessig blog. A nice e.g. of the strong respect for civil rights that fits well with Lessig-style cyberpolitics.
NerdTests.com Fun Tests - Nerd Quiz
.13.5 | No Comments »
May 13th, 2005 by Alex
I am heartbroken to discover that I only rate as semi-nerdy. I think the problem is that my nerdiness is restricted to tech nerdiness rather than general science nerdiness (on which front I score pathetically low). I’ll keep my eye out for something that tests specifically for computer nerdiness and hope for redemption.
Is podcasting the death of discourse?
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February 19th, 2005 by Alex
At the Northern Voice blogging conference, Tod Maffin offered his vision of podcasting, (in brief: audio blogging). Tod sees podcasting as a way of letting people create “vertical” audio feeds; instead of listening to general interest radio shows like As It Happens, listeners can create their own personal streams of audio, based on their own particular interests.
This is just the kind of scenario that keeps Cass Sunstein up at night. Sunstein worries about the political consequences of a world of custom media — a world in which the public sphere of common news and common dialogue has disappeared.
Tod’s response to this concern is that ideally we will have a world in which people consume both custom and general streams. Fellow panelist Marc Canter argued that quality topical content almost necessarily corsses fields and engages people with new issues — because a good story weaves in related topics. We should have faith that people will not get stuck in information ghettos.
I’m not so surea that the issue will self-resolve. What makes us think that a majority — or even a critical mass — of readers (listeners, viewers) will pull content that isn’t of immediate, personal interest. Look what’s happened to network news, or daily newspapers. Far from being an ennobling force, consumer interests have pushed “hard” news off the front page and down below Charles & Camilla or Michael Jackson.
Then again, maybe that’s the best argument that can be made for podcasting and other enablers of niche media. In an era that’s seen most of the mass media turned some version of People magazine, what have we got to lose?
On Technorati at northernvoice
Yak shaving etymology
.24.1 | 3 Comments »
January 24th, 2005 by Alex
I’ve finally done something to earn true geek credentials. No, not writing my own applescript (not that hard, actually). Not installing and terminating my own in-wall ethernet network (with brilliant foresight, just 6 months before wireless went consumer-grade). Not even enabling Linux-based printing on my Mac (printing to a Windows printer at 300dpi. Big whup.)
This time I’ve made the pros — or the geek equivalent thereof. A few months ago my husband and fellow blogger Rob Cottingham came across the neologism that had been missing from our lives: yak shaving. As defined by the Jargon Dictionary, yak shaving refers to
Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you’re working on.
The Jargon Dictionary credits the term to the MIT AI Lab by way of Ren & Stimpy.
Well anyone who’s every spent a week figuring out Linux-based printing rather than buying a $75 printer can tell you that yak shaving is a term whose time has come. The only problem with the term, as I wrote to yak shaving-promulgator Jeremy Brown, was that it lacked a decent etymology And I offered a fix.
Fast forward…and today’s e-mail from Jeremy letting me know that my yak shaving etymology was recently circulated to the social e-mail list of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. These are the folks who in another ten years are going to be sticking chips in your brain to replace that lousy cell phone headset. Arguably, the epicentre of true geek culture. And here’s what was deemed fit for their consumption:
What this term lacks is a compelling etymological pedigree. I figured it might work much better if the term was grounded in an historical/sociological description of the practice of yak shaving, as practiced by Tibetan villagers who mostly find that yaks function reasonably well in their unshaven state. But a diligent researcher observed a not-uncommon practice among these villagers, who, while harvesting their rice, would become frustrated with the all-too-commonly degraded property of their paddy-bridges. Paddy-bridge construction thus occurs most frequently during rice harvesting season, even though the exigencies of the market should actually deter harvest-season bridge building, since it results in delays in reaching the market that depress the price of the harvested grain. Nonetheless, construction proceeds apace…until the moment when the villagers finally bring their teams of yaks to cross the bridges, and retrieve the harvested rice bushels. Inevitably, this is the moment when the villagers suddenly remember the lesson of the year before — forgotten anew each season — and realize that the new bridge, not yet subject to the decaying properties of the humid paddy, is slightly narrower than its predecessor. The yaks will therefore not be able to fit across the bridge, and retrieve the rice, unless their thick coats are shaved. In a communal ritual that is far more time-consuming than its alternative (manually transporting the rice), the village shaves its entire population of yaks. This event is now celebrated with a series of yak-shaving songs, culminating in a hymn that serenades the yaks as they are led across the new bridges towards the freshly harvested rice.
I suppose I could do the research needed to generate that kind of etymology, but that would be yak shaving, wouldn’t it?