A 21st Century Glossary

As I prepare for a workshop I'm teaching on Friday, I've been thinking about all the new terms our language has acquired over the past ten years. Of course, some may disagree with some of my definitions, but the list reflects my understanding and use of these terms.

Here is the tip of the iceberg in no particular order. (Does this make me a bad librarian?)

Web 2.0—a term for the new ways that the web allows users to interact with, generate, and manipulate content.

RSS—Really Simple Syndication. (if only that were the case!) RSS allows users to subscribe to content that is regularly updated.

Aggregator—A tool such as Bloglines that pulls feeds from various web sites and brings them together in one place for the user’s convenience.

Social bookmarking—These tools enable users to bookmark sites that they can then access from any computer. Many people use it solely for this feature. The social aspect comes into play when users begin to look at each other’s bookmarks and discover new sites that they would like by exploring the bookmark lists of others.

Blog—A blog is an ongoing journal that a person keeps on the web and updates periodically. If you find a blogger who often has interesting/useful things to say, consider subscribing to the blog in your RSS aggregator. (Hint: you are reading a blog right now. Why not subscribe! There's a tutorial on how to do it in one of the very first posts on here.)

Podcast—Recording something digitally once and uploading it to the web is not a podcast! Like blogs, podcasts are ongoing endeavors that are updated daily/weekly/monthly/occasionally. Instead of a text format, podcasts are audio files that can be downloaded to an MP3 player or played directly from a computer.

Social networking—Most people think of MySpace and FaceBook when they think of social networking. Social networking is involved in many Web 2.0 tools. It is simply a way for users to find other users that they wish to associate with and follow each other’s content. Whether it is personal updates, professional research, or information/opinions on a particular topic, social networking allows like minds to connect online.

Wiki—A wiki is a web document that is written collaboratively by many people. The most commonly known wiki is Wikipedia. The collaborative nature of wikis makes it difficult to verify the source or validity of information, but allows a broader spectrum of information to be made available.

Tags—Tags are a way of marking content on the web to make it easier to find. The most obvious example would be on Flickr where users can tag photos so that they become searchable. In some cases, tags must be entered as all one word, so you may see tags such as portsmouthmiddleschool.