Internet Technology Glossary (M-Z)

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Have you ever heard a high-tech term and wondered what it meant? Too many vendors in our industry talk over their clients' heads by regularly using "geek speak" they don't understand. This page exists to answer the question, "What on earth is THAT?"

Just click on a phrase below for its definition, in "laymen's terms:"

Natural/Organic search
The "real" search results, versus "sponsored listings." Natural/organic search results, unlike paid advertising, are the results that most users are looking for and which take up most of the window after a person has performed a web search using a search engine website. For most searches, the search engine displays a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and important they are.

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Newsgroup
A newsgroup is a discussion about a particular subject consisting of notes written to a central Internet site and redistributed through Usenet, a worldwide network of news discussion groups.

Newsgroups are organized into subject hierarchies, with the first few letters of the newsgroup name indicating the major subject category and sub-categories represented by a subtopic name. Many subjects have multiple levels of subtopics. Some major subject categories are: news, rec (recreation), soc (society), sci (science), comp (computers), and so forth (there are many more). Users can post to existing newsgroups, respond to previous posts, and create new newsgroups.

Newcomers to newsgroups are requested to learn basic Usenet netiquette and to get familiar with a newsgroup before posting to it. A frequently-asked questions is provided. The rules can be found when you start to enter the Usenet through your browser or an online service. You can subscribe to the postings on a particular newsgroup.

Some newsgroups are moderated by a designated person who decides which postings to allow or to remove. Most newsgroups are unmoderated.

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Open Source Software (OSS)
Open source software (OSS) refers to software that is developed, tested, or improved through public collaboration and distributed with the idea that the fruit of that effort must be shared with others, ensuring an open future collaboration. Because it is "open," and not the exclusive property of a private corporation, there is no cost involved in using, modifying or distributing such software.

Development of the UNIX operating system was one of the first and most influential projects that led to a global, open source movement. Various other OSS projects, including Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP have revolutionized the software industry. In many cases open source software rivals even the best commercial counterparts when it comes to stability, power, performance and cost.

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Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Paid advertising which displays next to the natural search results. Customers can click on the ad to visit the advertiser’s website. This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers set their ads up to display whenever someone searches for a word which is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but are normally labelled “Sponsored Links”, and normally take up a smaller portion of the window. Advertisers who utilize this method of Internet marketing only pay for the traffic generated by clicks on the PPC ads.

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PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system of the computer on which the file is being viewed.

PDF's adoption in the early days of the format's history was slow. Adobe Acrobat, Adobe's suite for reading and creating PDFs, was not freely available; early versions of PDF had no support for external hyperlinks, reducing its usefulness on the Worldwide Web; the additional size of the PDF document compared to plain text meant significantly longer download times over the slower modems common at the time, and rendering the files was slow on less powerful computers.

Adobe soon started distribution of its Acrobat Reader (now Adobe Reader) program at no cost, and continued supporting the original PDF, which eventually became the de facto standard for printable documents on the Web.

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PHP
PHP is a widely-used, general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers. It is also the most popular Apache module among computers using Apache as a web server.

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Podcasting
Podcasting is the preparation and distribution of audio files using RSS to the computers of subscribed users. These files may then be uploaded to digital music or multimedia players like the iPod. A podcast can be easily created from a digital audio file. The podcaster first saves the file as an MP3 and then uploads it to the website of a service provider. The MP3 file gets its own URL, which is inserted into an RSS XML document as an enclosure within an XML tag.

Once a podcast has been created, it can be registered with content aggregators, such as podcasting.net or ipodder.org, for inclusion in podcast directories. People can browse through the categories or subscribe to specific podcast RSS feeds which will download to their audio players automatically when they next connect. Although podcasts are generally audio files created for digital music players, the same technology can be used to prepare and transmit images, text, and video to any capable device.

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Reciprocal linking
A mutual agreement between two webmasters to exchange links (i.e. they both add a link to the other’s website on their own website). Most search engines (certainly Google) are sophisticated enough to detect reciprocal linking and they don’t view it very favorably because it is clearly a manufactured method of generating links. Websites with reciprocal links risk being penalized.

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Social networking portal
Social networking is the practice of expanding the number of one's business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals. While social networking has gone on almost as long as societies themselves have existed, the unparallelled potential of the Internet to promote such connections is only now being fully recognized and exploited, through Web-based groups established for that purpose.

Based on the six degrees of separation concept (the idea that any two people on the planet could make contact through a chain of no more than five intermediaries), social networking establishes interconnected Internet communities (sometimes known as personal networks) that help people make contacts that would be good for them to know, but that they would be unlikely to have met otherwise. In general, here's how it works: you join one of the sites and invite people you know to join as well. Those people invite their contacts to join, who in turn invite their contacts to join, and the process repeats for each person. In theory, any individual can make contact through anyone they have a connection to, to any of the people that  person has a connection to, and so on.

Examples of websites that facilitate social networking include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace, to name a few.

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SSL encryption
SSL (short for "Secure Sockets Layer") is a commonly-used protocol for managing the security of data on the Internet. SSL uses a program layer located between the Internet's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Transport Control Protocol (TCP) layers that encrypts data. SSL is included as part of both the Microsoft and Netscape browsers and most Web server products. The "sockets" part of the term refers to the sockets method of passing data back and forth between a client and a server program in a network or between program layers in the same computer. SSL uses the public-and-private key encryption system from RSA, which also includes the use of a digital certificate.

SSL is an integral part of most Web browsers (clients) and Web servers. If a website is on a server that supports SSL, SSL can be enabled and specific Web pages can be identified as requiring SSL access. SSL encryption and the digital certificates that verify the identity of a website are vital components on any website using e-commerce to sell products or services online. SSL ensures that credit card data (or any other sensitive information) is protected when it is sent over the Internet through a website.

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Stock photography
Stock photography, also referred to as royalty-free photography, describes existing photographs that can be licensed for specific uses. Publishers, advertising agencies, graphic artists, and others use stock photography to fulfill the needs of their creative assignments. Many organizations choose to use this option for the artwork used on their website because it is much less expensive than paying a professional photographer to do a custom photo shoot.

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Streaming media (audio/video)
Streaming media is sound (audio) and pictures (video) that are transmitted on the Internet in a streaming or continuous fashion, using data packets. The most effective reception of streaming media requires some form of broadband technology such as cable modem or DSL.

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Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
Uniform Resource Locator is a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) which also specifies where the identified resource is available on the Internet and the protocol for retrieving it. In a nutshell, a URL is synonymous with the web address a person types into a web browser to view a particular website. For example, the URL for the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation is http://www.christopherreeve.org, and the URL for DC Comics is http://www.dccomics.com.

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Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a living term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis and blogs. The term 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 changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.

According to Tim O'Reilly: "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

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Web form(s)
Web forms are simply online versions of hardcopy, paper forms which ask for information. They contain fields in which you can type the answers to questions asked, and when finished they include a "Submit" button which will result in your input getting saved to a database and/or e-mailed to the recipient. Web forms have many practical applications, including customer satisfaction surveys,  help desk ticket submissions and more.

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Website hosting
Hosting (also known as website hosting, Web hosting, and Webhosting) is the business of housing, serving, and maintaining files for one or more websites. More important than the computer space that is provided for website files is the fast connection to the Internet. Most hosting services offer connections on T-carrier system lines. Typically, an individual business hosting its own site would require a similar connection and it would be expensive. Using a hosting service lets many companies share the cost of a fast Internet connection for serving files.

A number of hosting companies describe their services as virtual hosting. Virtual hosting usually implies that their services will be transparent and that each website will have its own domain name and set of e-mail addresses. In most usages, hosting and virtual hosting are synonyms. Some hosting companies let you have your own virtual server, the appearance that you are controlling a server that is dedicated entirely to your site.

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Web-based file upload/download
This is simply a web form which includes a feature that allows website visitors to upload a file to your web server. This feature is an excellent solution to instances where you need to send someone a file, but the filesize makes sending it via e-mail impractical.

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Webinar
A webinar (also referred to as a webcast) describes a specific type of web conference. It is typically one-way, from the speaker to the audience with limited audience interaction. A webinar can be collaborative and include polling and question & answer sessions to allow full participation between the audience and the presenter. In some cases, the presenter may speak over a standard telephone line, pointing out information being presented on screen and the audience can respond over their own telephones, preferably a speaker phone. There are web conferencing technologies on the market that have fully incorporated the use of Internet audio technology, to allow for a truly web-based communication. Webinars may (depending upon the provider) provide hidden or anonymous participant functionality, enabling participants to be unaware of other participants in the same meeting. Today's progressive companies are taking advantage of the many benefits webinars offer, including boosting sales, retaining customers, providing less expensive training options for its employees, to name a few.

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Wiki
A wiki (sometimes spelled "Wiki") is a server program that allows users to collaborate in forming the content of a website. With a wiki, any user can edit the site content, including other users' contributions, using a regular Web browser. Basically, a wiki website operates on a principle of collaborative trust. The term comes from the word "wikiwiki," which means "fast" in the Hawaiian language.

A wiki allows a visitor to the "wikified" website to edit the content of the site from their own computer. Visitors can also create new content and change the organization of existing content. The simplest wiki programs allow editing of text and hyperlinks only. More advanced wikis make it possible to add or change images, tables, and certain interactive components such as games.

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World Wide Web (WWW)
The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to "the Web") is a system of interlinked HTML documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser - such as Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera - a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland and released in 1992. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web.

The following broader and more elegant definition comes from the organization that Berners-Lee helped found, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):

"The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge."

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