Hacks/Hackers Survival Glossary for Journalists

Posted on | July 10, 2010 | 3 Comments

If you’re feel­ing over­whelmed by the jar­gon asso­ci­ated with dig­i­tal media, you are not alone. As Dis­placed Jour­nal­ists eager to get back in the game, we all need to be well-versed in ever-evolving tech­nol­ogy lingo.

Hacks/Hackers, a net­work con­cerned with the inter­sec­tion of jour­nal­ism and tech­nol­ogy, has come up with a list of impor­tant tech­nol­ogy terms. It’s espe­cially nice because

it’s writ­ten for non-techies and it’s crowd­sourced, which means that it’s con­stantly being updated by indi­vid­u­als who sub­mit terms they find miss­ing from the list.

In keep­ing with an open phi­los­o­phy of crowd­sourc­ing, Hacks/Hackers has made its list avail­able to any­one to repub­lish under a Cre­ative Com­mons licence and the net­work encour­ages you to con­tribute to make it even better.

Below is a note from Hacks/Hackers and the group’s cur­rent sur­vival guide for jour­nal­ists who like to under­stand all the impor­tant tech terms in online pub­lish­ing. To make it easy to check back for up-to-date glos­saries in the future, book­mark the Hacks/Hackers resource page.

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Con­fused? So were we, which is why we put together this Hacks/Hackers Sur­vival Glos­sary as an expla­na­tion of terms that help us under­stand the infor­ma­tion land­scape. This is a crowd­sourced doc­u­ment that pro­vides a guide to tech­nolo­gies involved in mod­ern con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion, coör­di­nated by Hacks/Hackers, a grass­roots group that brings jour­nal­ists and tech­nol­o­gists together.  Don’t know Dru­pal from Django, API from Ajax, mashup from meta­data? This is the list for you. It’s writ­ten for intel­li­gent non­techies in (mostly) plain Eng­lish. Feel free to dis­trib­ute or con­tribute.  Instruc­tions are here.

API (Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming Inter­face) — The way com­puter pro­grams share data and func­tion­al­ity with other com­puter pro­grams. APIs are an increas­ingly crit­i­cal part of the Internet’s inter­con­nec­tion. Many say that the future of the Inter­net lies in APIs because they help dis­trib­ute and com­bine con­tent. On the Web, APIs are gen­er­ally spe­cial URLs that give back machine-readable data, in for­mats like JSON or XML, rather than human-readable data, which is usu­ally HTML. Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Maps all have APIs that allow other web­sites or com­puter pro­grams to use their under­ly­ing tools. The New York Times and NPR have also released APIs that allow other pro­grams to draw on archives of movie reviews, restau­rant reviews and articles.

algo­rithm — A set of instruc­tions or pro­ce­dures used in order to accom­plish a task, such as cre­at­ing search results in Google. In the con­text of search, algo­rithms are used to pro­vide the most rel­e­vant results first based on those instructions.

Android — Usu­ally used in the con­text of Android phone, Android is a free and open source oper­at­ing sys­tem devel­oped by Google that pow­ers a vari­ety of mobile phones from dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers and car­ri­ers. It is a rival of the iPhone plat­form. In con­trast to Apple’s tightly con­trolled archi­tec­ture and App Store, Android allows users to install apps from the Android Mar­ket and from other chan­nels, such as directly from a developer’s web­site — which allows for X-rated con­tent, for exam­ple. Some well-known Android phones are the Nexus One, the Motorola Droid and HTC Evo. Expect to see com­peti­tors to the iPad run­ning a ver­sion of Android.

app — Short for appli­ca­tion, a pro­gram that runs inside another ser­vice. Many mobile phones allow apps to be down­loaded, lead­ing to a bur­geon­ing econ­omy for mod­estly priced soft­ware. Can also refer to a pro­gram or tool that can be used within a web­site. Apps gen­er­ally are built using soft­ware toolk­its pro­vided by the under­ly­ing ser­vice, whether it is iPhone or Facebook.

AJAX — A bun­dle of tech­nolo­gies and tech­niques that allow a web page to do things qui­etly in the back­ground with­out reload­ing the whole page. AJAX is not a pro­gram­ming lan­guage, but rather an acronym used to describe that bun­dle, “Asyn­chro­nous Javascript and XML.” AJAX pro­vides much of the func­tion­al­ity asso­ci­ated with Web 2.0. One of the first big uses of AJAX was Gmail, which allowed it to be much more respon­sive than other web e-mail at the time.

Atom — A syn­di­ca­tion for­mat for machine read­able web feeds that is usu­ally acces­si­ble via a URL. While it was cre­ated as an alter­na­tive to RSS (Real Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion) to improve upon RSS’s defi­cien­cies (such as ambi­gu­i­ties), it still is sec­ondary to RSS. (See also, RSS)

blog — One of the first wide­spread web-native pub­lish­ing for­mats, gen­er­ally char­ac­ter­ized by reverse chrono­log­i­cal order­ing, rapid response, link­ing, and robust com­ment­ing. While orig­i­nally per­ceived to be light on report­ing and heavy on com­men­tary, a num­ber of blogs are now thor­oughly reported, and legacy media orga­ni­za­tions have also launched var­i­ous blogs. Orig­i­nally short for “web log,” blog is now an accepted word in Scrabble.

Blog­ger — A sim­ple, free blog­ging plat­form cre­ated by Pyra Labs, which was sold to Google in 2003.  It was one of the first mass blog­ging ser­vices and is cred­ited with pop­u­lar­iz­ing the for­mat. Unlike Word­Press, it is not open source. Many Blog­ger sites are hosted at blogspot.com.

civic media — An umbrella term describ­ing media tech­nolo­gies that cre­ate a strong sense of engage­ment among res­i­dents through news and infor­ma­tion. It is often used as a con­trast to “cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism” because it also encom­passes map­ping, wikis and data­bases. MIT has a Cen­ter for Future Civic Media.

cloud com­put­ing —  An increas­ingly pop­u­lar com­put­ing model in which infor­ma­tion and soft­ware are pro­vided on demand from over the Inter­net rather than stay­ing on local com­put­ers. Cloud com­put­ing is appeal­ing because com­pa­nies can reduce the amount they spend on their own com­puter servers and soft­ware but can also quickly and eas­ily expand as the com­pany grows.  Exam­ples of cloud com­put­ing appli­ca­tions include Google Docs and Yahoo Mail. Ama­zon offers two cloud com­put­ing ser­vices: EC2, which many start-ups now use as a cheap way to launch their prod­ucts, and S3, an online stor­age sys­tem many com­pa­nies use for cheap storage.

client side — Refer­ring to net­work soft­ware where work takes place on the user’s com­puter, the client, rather than at the cen­tral com­puter, known as the server. Advan­tages of doing so include speed and band­width. An exam­ple is Javascript, a pro­gram­ming lan­guage that allows devel­op­ers to build inter­ac­tiv­ity into web­sites. The work is done within the browser, rather than at the host­ing web­site. (See also server side)

CMS (Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem) — Soft­ware designed to orga­nize large amounts of dynamic mate­r­ial for a web­site, usu­ally con­sist­ing of at least tem­plates and a data­base. It is gen­er­ally syn­ony­mous with online pub­lish­ing sys­tem. The mate­r­ial can include doc­u­ments, pho­tos or videos. While the first gen­er­a­tion of con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems were cus­tom and pro­pri­etary, in recent years there has been a surge in free open-source sys­tems such as Dru­pal, Word­Press and Joomla. Con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems are some­times built cus­tom from scratch with frame­works such as Ruby on Rails or Django.

CPA (Cost Per Action) — A pric­ing model in which the adver­tiser is charged for an ad based on how many users take a spe­cific, pre-defined action—such as buy­ing a prod­uct from an online store—based on view­ing an ad.  This is the “gold stan­dard” for adver­tis­ers because it most directly matches the cost of an ad to its effec­tive­ness. How­ever, it’s not com­monly used since it’s extremely dif­fi­cult to mea­sure: it is often unclear when or how to attribute an action to a spe­cific ad. (Also some­times referred to as Cost Per Acquisition.)

CPC (Cost Per Click) — A pric­ing model in which the adver­tiser is charged for an ad based on how many users click it. This is a com­mon model for “search adver­tis­ing” (the all-text ads asso­ci­ated with search results) and for text ads in gen­eral. CPC is well-suited for “directed” adver­tis­ing, intended to prompt an imme­di­ate response, because a user’s click­ing on an ad shows engage­ment with it. Google AdWords is gen­er­ally priced on a CPC basis.

CPM (Cost Per Mille) — Cost per one thou­sand (often views). Much of online adver­tis­ing — par­tic­u­larly dis­play adver­tis­ing — is priced on a CPM basis. (Mille = Latin for one thou­sand; we use “K” for “kilo” almost every­where else in tech, but “M” for “mille” here, which causes some con­fu­sion.) CPM is well suited for “brand” or “aware­ness” adver­tis­ing, in which the pri­mary pur­pose of the ad is not nec­es­sar­ily to prompt an imme­di­ate response.

Cre­ative Com­mons — A flex­i­ble set of copy­right licenses that allow con­tent cre­ators to spec­ify which rights they reserve and which they waive regard­ing their work that is sup­posed to cod­ify  col­lab­o­ra­tive spirit of the Inter­net. There are six main Cre­ative Com­mons licenses based on four con­di­tions that cre­ators can choose to apply: Attri­bu­tion, Share Alike, Non-Commercial, and No Deriv­a­tive Works. The least restric­tive of the licenses is Attri­bu­tion, which grants any­one, from an indi­vid­ual to a large com­pany, the right to dis­trib­ute, dis­play, or oth­er­wise make use of the work so long as the cre­ator is cred­ited. The most restric­tive is Attri­bu­tion Non-Commercial No Deriv­a­tives, which grants only redis­tri­b­u­tion. First released in Decem­ber 2002 by the non­profit Cre­ative Com­mons orga­ni­za­tion, which was inspired by the open source GNU GPL license, the licenses are now used on an esti­mated 130 mil­lion works world­wide. The glos­sary you are read­ing is released under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion Share Alike license in an effort to encour­age wide dis­tri­b­u­tion and con­tri­bu­tion. (Also see open source)

CSS  (Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets) — Instruc­tions used to describe the look and for­mat­ting for doc­u­ments, usu­ally HTML, so that the pre­sen­ta­tion is sep­a­rate from the actual con­tent of the doc­u­ment itself. If you watch a web page that loads slowly, you will often see the text first load and then “snap into place” with its look and feel. That look and feel is con­trolled by the CSS. CSS, which was first intro­duced by the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium in the late 1990s, helped elim­i­nate the clumsy and often repet­i­tive markup in the orig­i­nal HTML syn­tax. W3cschools.com has a great intro­duc­tion to CSS with tutorials.

CSV (Comma-Separated Val­ues) — An extremely sim­ple data for­mat which stores infor­ma­tion in a text file. CSV is pop­u­lar pre­cisely because it can be eas­ily read by many dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions, includ­ing spread­sheets, word proces­sors, pro­gram­ming text edi­tors and web browsers. Thus it is a com­mon way for peo­ple, includ­ing gov­ern­ments, to make their data avail­able. Each row of data is rep­re­sented by a line of text. Each col­umn is delimited/separated by a comma (,).  To pre­vent con­fu­sion about com­mas in the data, the terms are often sur­rounded by dou­ble quotes (“). Many appli­ca­tions sup­port the use of alter­na­tive col­umn delim­iters (the pipe char­ac­ter, |,  is pop­u­lar). Exam­ple below:
“Name”,“Address”,“email“
“Jack”,“1 Main St., Town, NY”,“jack@hill.com“
“Jill”,“2 Elm St., City, CA”,“jill@hill.com”

data visu­al­iza­tion — A grow­ing area of con­tent cre­ation in which infor­ma­tion is rep­re­sented graph­i­cally and often inter­ac­tively. This can be used for sub­jects as diverse as an analy­sis of a speech by the pres­i­dent and the pop­u­lar­ity of baby names over time. While it has deep roots in acad­e­mia, data visu­al­iza­tion has begun to emerge on con­tent sites as a way to han­dle the masses of data that are being made pub­lic, often by gov­ern­ment. There are many tools for data visu­al­iza­tions, includ­ing Seattle-based Tableau and IBM’s Many Eyes. Data visu­al­iza­tion should 1) tell a story, 2) allow users to ask their own ques­tions and 3) start conversations.

document-oriented data­base — An increas­ingly pop­u­lar type of data­base. In con­trast to rela­tional data­bases, which rigidly require infor­ma­tion to be stored in pre-defined tables, document-oriented data­bases are more free-flowing and flex­i­ble. This is impor­tant when you don’t know what is going to be thrown at you. Document-oriented data­bases retrieve infor­ma­tion more quickly, but store it less effi­ciently. The same document-oriented data­base might let you store the infor­ma­tion for an arti­cle (head­line, byline, data, con­tent, mis­cel­la­neous) or for a photo (file, pho­tog­ra­pher, date, cut­line).  Mon­goDB is a pop­u­lar open source document-oriented data­base.

Dru­pal — A pop­u­lar con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem known for a vibrant open-source com­mu­nity that cre­ates diverse and robust exten­sions. Dru­pal is very pow­er­ful, but it is some­what dif­fi­cult to use for sim­ple tasks when com­pared to Word­Press. Dru­pal pro­vides options to cre­ate a sta­tic web­site, a multi-user blog, an Inter­net forum or a com­mu­nity web­site for user-generated con­tent. It is writ­ten in PHP and dis­trib­uted under the GPL open source license.  Whitehouse.gov uses Drupal.

Django — A web frame­work that is pop­u­lar among news and infor­ma­tion sites, in part due to its ori­gin at Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas.  It is writ­ten in Python, a sophis­ti­cated dynamic lan­guage. Major projects built in Django include Dis­qus, Everyblock.com and TheOnion.com. News appli­ca­tions teams, includ­ing those at the Chicago Tri­bune and Los Ange­les Times, use the frame­work to present large data sets online in eas­ily acces­si­ble ways.

embed — A term mean­ing to place a spe­cific piece of con­tent from one web page inside of another one.  This is often done using an embed code (a few lines of HTML and/or Javascript) that you can copy or paste.  This is a com­mon way for video con­tent to be spread around the Inter­net and is increas­ingly being used for inter­ac­tive com­po­nents.  A recent exam­ple is PBS Newshour’s oil spill tracker wid­get, which was placed on many news sites around the coun­try. Note: This is dif­fer­ent from the news­room sense of “embed,” pop­u­lar­ized dur­ing the 2003 Iraqi inva­sion, which means to have a jour­nal­ist work from within a mil­i­tary unit.

EC2 — A com­put­ing power rental sys­tem by Ama­zon that has become pop­u­lar among tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies because it is much cheaper than main­tain­ing your own com­puter servers. Users can host their appli­ca­tions on EC2 and pay depend­ing on usage. EC2 is an exam­ple of cloud com­put­ing. (Also see cloud computing)

Face­book Con­nect— A tech­nol­ogy from Face­book that allows a reader to log into a third-party web­site with their Face­book account, rather than cre­at­ing a new pro­file for that web­site. Face­book Con­nect, which is an API, also allows the third par­ties to pull cer­tain data from the user’s pro­file, such as his or her name and age. In turn, the reader’s activ­i­ties on the web­site can also be dis­played on her or his Face­book pro­file.  Launched in 2007, Face­book Con­nect was one of the first exam­ples of Face­book extend­ing itself into a plat­form for the entire Web. (Also see OAuth, Open ID)

Face­book com­mu­nity page — Intro­duced in April 2010, com­mu­nity pages were cre­ated as a coun­ter­part to “offi­cial fan pages,” which are built around a spe­cific per­son, com­pany, orga­ni­za­tion, prod­uct, or brand.  In large part, com­mu­nity pages are mostly auto-generated around inter­ests or affil­i­a­tions found in people’s pro­files, like cook­ing. There is not a way to actively add con­tent to the page, unlike with Face­book groups. But because they are auto­gen­er­ated, based on likes, they can quickly build gigan­tic mem­ber­ships. Cook­ing, for exam­ple, has over 2 mil­lion fans.  These pages are a bit con­fus­ing, and Face­book is still work­ing on the kinks.

Face­book fan page — A Face­book pro­file for a spe­cific per­son, prod­uct, com­pany or orga­ni­za­tion, usu­ally admin­is­tered by offi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tives. This is dif­fer­ent from a Face­book per­sonal page, which must be owned by an indi­vid­ual, and dif­fer­ent from a Face­book com­mu­nity page, which is built around an inter­est not related to a brand, such as “cook­ing.” It is also dif­fer­ent from a Face­book group. Fan pages can gather thou­sands or mil­lions of fans though “likes,” and offi­cial posts by the page admin­is­tra­tor gen­er­ally go into the fans’ news streams.  Once a page has more than 25 fans, it can claim a short form URL, such as facebook.com/nytimes or facebook.com/wikileaks. Face­book com­mu­nity and fan pages are strong play­ers in ongo­ing efforts to bring con­tent to peo­ple where they already are, instead of requir­ing them to come to the con­tent.

Face­book group — Face­book groups are anal­o­gous to offline clubs. Unlike Face­book fan pages, groups do not have to be admin­is­tered by offi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tives. In addi­tion, the activ­ity posted in groups does not get pushed into users’ feeds. But as long as it has fewer than 5,000 mem­bers, Face­book groups are allowed to mass-message all their members.

Face­book per­sonal page — A pro­file page tied to a sin­gle indi­vid­ual. What infor­ma­tion is con­trolled (in the­ory) by the indi­vid­ual. How­ever, because there is a 5,000-person limit to friends, some celebri­ties have fan pages instead. As of 2009, indi­vid­u­als can choose a user­name, which makes their page avail­able at facebook.com/username.

Flash — A pro­pri­etary plat­form owned by Adobe Sys­tems that allows for drag-and-drop ani­ma­tions, pro­gram inter­ac­tiv­ity, and dynamic dis­plays for the Web. The lan­guage used, Action­Script, is owned by Adobe; this con­trasts with many other pop­u­lar pro­gram­ming lan­guages that are open source. Cre­ators must use Adobe’s Cre­ative Suite prod­ucts and web surfers must install a Flash plug-in for their browser. Many claim that Flash play­ers are unsta­ble and inef­fi­cient, slow­ing down web pages and crash­ing oper­at­ing sys­tems. Apple has not allowed Adobe to cre­ate a Flash player for the iPhone oper­at­ing sys­tem, which has cre­ated a feud between the two com­pa­nies. HTML5 is emerg­ing as an open alter­na­tive to Flash.

frame­work — A soft­ware pack­age that makes writ­ing pro­grams eas­ier by pro­vid­ing all the “plumb­ing” for a par­tic­u­lar type of task (like writ­ing a web app), allow­ing pro­gram­mers to just “fill in the blanks” with their own project-specific needs. For instance, Web devel­op­ment frame­works like Ruby on Rails (writ­ten in Ruby, mean­ing pro­gram­mers use Ruby to do the “fill in the blanks” tasks) and Django (writ­ten in Python), have easy-to-use, built-in sup­port for com­mon web devel­op­ment tasks, such as read­ing and writ­ing to a data­base, writ­ing con­tent in html, and so forth.  Watch Django and Ruby cre­ators dis­cuss the mer­its of their frame­works on DjangoProject.com.

Foursquare — One of many new mobile ser­vices, along with Gowalla, SCVNGR and oth­ers, that com­bines geolo­ca­tion with game mechan­ics. Launched in 2009 at SXSW Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence, Foursquare allows users to “check in” at loca­tions (bars, restau­rants, play­grounds and more) to inform peo­ple in their social net­works of their where­abouts while earn­ing badges, col­lect­ing points and becom­ing the “mayor” of cer­tain loca­tions. Despite a rel­a­tively mod­est user base at the begin­ning, Foursquare quickly attracted a lot of atten­tion for its poten­tial for mar­ket­ing and cus­tomer brand loy­alty.

geo­tag — A piece of infor­ma­tion that goes with con­tent and con­tains geo­graph­i­cally based infor­ma­tion.  Com­monly used on photo sites such as Flickr or in con­junc­tion with user-generated con­tent, to show where a photo, video or arti­cle came from. There has been some dis­cus­sion of its increas­ing rel­e­vance with geo­graph­i­cally con­nected social net­work­ing sites, such as Foursquare. Twit­ter has imple­mented geo­t­ag­ging, and Face­book has announced plans to do so.

Google AdSense — Google’s online adver­tis­ing net­work that allows con­tent pub­lish­ers to embed a piece of code to dis­play Google ads on their sites. The ads are selected based on the con­tent of the page. Ad rev­enue is split between Google and the pub­lisher in an undis­closed pro­por­tion, gen­er­ally believed to be two-thirds to the pub­lisher. (Note: ads on Google’s own sites are cov­ered by Google AdWords, not AdSense.)

Google AdWords — Google’s text-based flag­ship adver­tis­ing prod­uct, which pro­vides the lion’s share of the com­pany rev­enue. Ads are dis­played on Google’s own sites based on search terms that users type in, and adver­tis­ers pay only when the users click on them. The search terms, called key­words, are pur­chased by adver­tis­ers; avail­abil­ity of a given key­word is based in part on an auc­tion sys­tem, and in part on the respon­sive­ness of the audience.

Google Buzz — Launched in Feb­ru­ary 2010, Buzz is Google’s attempt to counter Twit­ter and Face­book by lever­ag­ing the social graphs from users’ e-mail accounts. A more sophis­ti­cated ver­sion of Gmail “sta­tus updates,” Buzz allows users to post updates about what they are doing, link to what they are read­ing and post their cur­rent loca­tions. The ser­vice can inte­grate with other Google ser­vices, as well as feed into Twit­ter.  Despite an ini­tial burst of pub­lic­ity, Google Buzz has not gained tremen­dous trac­tion. It attracted crit­i­cism when Google auto­mat­i­cally and pub­licly con­nected users with peo­ple they had e-mailed most often in the past, mak­ing pri­vate infor­ma­tion unex­pect­edly avail­able. Google released enhanced pri­vacy con­trols after the controversy.

Google Docs — A free online ser­vice offered by Google, com­pris­ing word pro­cess­ing, spread­sheet, pre­sen­ta­tion and other soft­ware, all of which is “in the cloud.” Users can work col­lab­o­ra­tively on doc­u­ments, edit­ing them simul­ta­ne­ously. The ser­vice is increas­ingly being seen as erod­ing Microsoft Office’s mar­ket share. The glos­sary you’re read­ing right now was col­lab­o­ra­tively cre­ated in Google Docs.

Google Wave — An online col­lab­o­ra­tive space intro­duced by Google in which peo­ple can com­mu­ni­cate and work together in real time; it resem­bles a “souped up Instant Mes­sen­ger.” Par­tic­i­pants can add rich text, images, attach­ments, videos and maps to cre­ate a mul­ti­me­dia col­lab­o­ra­tion. A play­back option allows new users to get up to speed on projects and cre­ates an envi­ron­ment that is both real-time and asyn­chro­nous. Despite a mas­sive amount of atten­tion, Google Wave has not got­ten much trac­tion. It is, as some peo­ple have said, “a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion in search of a prob­lem.“

HTML (Hyper­text Markup Lan­guage) — The dom­i­nant for­mat­ting lan­guage used on the World Wide Web to pub­lish text, images and other ele­ments. Invented by Tim Bern­ers Lee in the early 1990s, HTML uses pairs of open­ing and clos­ing tags (also known as ele­ments), such as <title> and </title>; each pair assigns mean­ing to the text that appears between them. HTML can be con­sid­ered code, but it is not a pro­gram­ming lan­guage; it’s a markup lan­guage, which is a sep­a­rate beast. The lat­est stan­dard of HTML is HTML5, which adds pow­er­ful inter­ac­tive functionality.

HTML5 — The upcom­ing, pow­er­ful stan­dard of Hyper­text Markup Lan­guage, which has added advanced inter­ac­tive fea­tures, such as allow­ing video to be embed­ded on a web page. It is gain­ing in pop­u­lar­ity com­pared to pro­pri­etary stan­dards, like Adobe Flash, because it is an open stan­dard and does not require third-party plu­g­ins. Using HTML5 will allow web pages to work more like desk­top appli­ca­tions. The lat­est releases of most browsers sup­port HTML5 to vary­ing degrees.  HTML5 does not cover CSS and JavaScript, but often when peo­ple refer to HTML5, they often are using it as a blan­ket term, apply­ing not only to changes to the HTML, but also to changes in CSS and JavaScript.

iframe — An HTML tag that allows for one web page to be wholly included inside another; it is a pop­u­lar way to cre­ate embed­d­a­ble inter­ac­tive fea­tures.  Iframes are usu­ally con­structed via JavaScript as a way around web browsers’ secu­rity fea­tures, which try to pre­vent JavaScript on one page from quickly talk­ing to JavaScript on an exter­nal page. Many secu­rity breaches have been designed using iframes.

iPad — Released in April 2010, the iPad is Apple’s tablet com­put­ing device, akin to a large iPod Touch; it uses the same oper­at­ing sys­tem and devel­op­ment tools as the iPhone. It fea­tures a mul­ti­touch screen and comes in 3G and wifi ver­sions. Some news orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing The New York Times, Wired and National Geo­graphic, have cre­ated spe­cial appli­ca­tions designed for the iPad. Some have hoped that it would be the “Jesus” tablet that would breathe new life into legacy print pub­li­ca­tions. Upon its announce­ment in Jan­u­ary 2010, many noted its name was rem­i­nis­cent of fem­i­nine hygiene prod­ucts.

iPhone — Apple’s smart phone has sold more than 50 mil­lion units world­wide since it launched in 2007. The first smart­phone to intro­duce mul­ti­touch screen capa­bil­ity, it is con­sid­ered in the same ver­ti­cal as the Black­berry, Google’s Android and Palm Pre. The crit­i­cal mass of iPhones, along with Apple’s pre-existing iTunes infra­struc­ture, allowed Apple to launch the first truly robust mar­ket­place for mobile appli­ca­tions, cre­at­ing a whole new micro­econ­omy for innovation.

iPod Touch — Essen­tially an iPhone with­out the phone. Slim­mer than the iPhone, the iPod touch can play music and run iPhone apps. It con­nects to the Inter­net via wifi.

JavaScript — A Web script­ing lan­guage used to enhance web­sites; it can make them more inter­ac­tive with­out requir­ing a browser plu­gin. JavaScript is inter­preted by your browser instead of by a web server, oth­er­wise known as a client-side script­ing lan­guage. JavaScript files gen­er­ally end in .js. Despite its name, it is not related to the Java language.

Joomla — A free, open-source con­tent man­age­ment built in PHP. It is more pow­er­ful than Word­Press but not as pow­er­ful as Dru­pal. How­ever it is known for its exten­sive design options. The name Joomla means “all together” in Swahili.

jQuery — A incred­i­bly pop­u­lar open source JavaScript library designed for manip­u­lat­ing HTML pages and han­dling events.  Released in 2006, jQuery quickly gained wide­spread adop­tion because of its effi­ciency and ele­gance. The defin­i­tive fea­ture of jQuery is its sup­port for “chain­ing” oper­a­tions together to sim­plify oth­er­wise com­pli­cated tasks. It is the most pop­u­lar JavaScript library.

JSON (JavaScript Object-Notation) — A Web data pub­lish­ing for­mat that is designed to be both eas­ily human — and machine — read­able. It is an alter­na­tive to XML that is more con­cise because, unlike XML, it is not a markup lan­guage that requires open and close tags.

Key/value store — A sim­pler way of stor­ing data than a rela­tional or doc­u­ment data­base. Key-value stores have a sim­ple struc­ture, match­ing val­ues to acces­si­ble “keys,” or indices. In Web devel­op­ment, key/value stores are often (though not always) used for optimization.

LAMP —  An acronym refer­ring to a bun­dle of free open-source Web tech­nolo­gies that have become incred­i­bly pop­u­lar as a method for build­ing web­sites. The let­ters stand for the Linux oper­at­ing sys­tem, Apache web server, MySQL data­base, and either PHP, Perl or Python. This is often referred to as a “LAMP stack.” A rival alter­na­tive would be a bun­dle of Microsoft prod­ucts. Serverwatch.com has a good explanation.

legacy media — An umbrella term to describe the cen­tral­ized media insti­tu­tions that were dom­i­nant dur­ing the sec­ond half of the 20^th cen­tury, includ­ing — but not lim­ited to — tele­vi­sion, radio, news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines, all which gen­er­ally had a uni-directional dis­tri­b­u­tion model. Some­times “legacy media” is used inter­change­ably with “MSM,” for “Main­stream Media.” Legacy media sits in con­trast with social media, where the pro­duc­tion and shar­ing is of equal weight to the consumption.

library — In the con­text of pro­gram­ming, this con­tains code that can be accessed for soft­ware and Web devel­op­ment, enabling one to per­form com­mon tasks with­out writ­ing new code every time. Many libraries are freely shared. One well-known library is jQuery, released in 2006 and now the most pop­u­lar JavaScript library, which boasts that it allows coders to “write less, do more.”

location-based ser­vices — A ser­vice, usu­ally in a mobile Web or mobile device appli­ca­tion, that uses your loca­tion in order to per­form a cer­tain task, such as find­ing nearby restau­rants, giv­ing you direc­tions, or locat­ing your friends. Foursquare and Gowalla are location-based ser­vices.

mashup — A com­bi­na­tion of data from mul­ti­ple sources, usu­ally through the use of APIs. An exam­ple of a mashup would be an app that shows the loca­tions of all the movie the­aters in a par­tic­u­lar town on a Google map. It is mash­ing up one data source (the addresses of movie the­aters) with another data source (the geo­graphic loca­tion of those addresses on a map).

meta­data — Data about data. Exam­ples of meta­data include descrip­tors indi­cat­ing when infor­ma­tion was cre­ated, by whom and in what for­mat. Meta­data helps to orga­nize infor­ma­tion online and make it machine-readable. HTML is an exam­ple of meta­data — it orga­nizes the data in a web page so browsers can dis­play it sen­si­bly. Web pages often have hid­den meta­data that helps with their search engine ranks. Pho­tos uploaded to Flickr carry meta­data such as time taken, cam­era model and shut­ter speed.  MP3s have meta­data such as the artist name, track title, album name and so on.

Microsoft Sil­verlight — Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash, allow­ing the inte­gra­tion of mul­ti­me­dia, graph­ics, ani­ma­tions, and inter­ac­tiv­ity into web pages. It was ini­tially released in 2007 and is occa­sion­ally spot­ted on the web.

mobile — An umbrella term in tech­nol­ogy that was long syn­ony­mous with cel­lu­lar phones but has since grown to encom­pass tablet com­put­ing (the iPad) and even net­books. In ret­ro­spect, an early mobile tech­nol­ogy was the pager. Some­times the term is used inter­change­ably with “wire­less.” It gen­er­ally refers to unteth­ered com­put­ing devices that can access the Inter­net over radiofre­quency waves, though some­times also via wi-fi. Mobile tech­nol­ogy usu­ally demands a dif­fer­ent set of stan­dards — design and oth­er­wise — than desk­top com­put­ers, and has opened up an entirely new area for geo-aware applications.

MySQL — The dom­i­nant open-source data­base man­age­ment sys­tem on the Inter­net. It is pop­u­lar because it is a free and flex­i­ble alter­na­tive to expen­sive sys­tems like Ora­cle. Projects that use MySQL include Face­book and Wikipedia. The SQL stands for “Struc­tured Query Lan­guage” and “My” is the name of the inventor’s daugh­ter. It is offi­cially pro­nounced My-S-Q-L, but you will often hear it referred to as “My Sequel.” MySQL is a rela­tional data­base man­age­ment sys­tem, not a document-oriented data­base sys­tem. (Also see document-oriented data­base)

OAuth — A new method that allows users to share infor­ma­tion stored on one site with another site. For exam­ple, some web-based Twit­ter clients will use OAuth to con­nect to your account, instead of requir­ing you to pro­vide your pass­word directly to that third-party site. It is sim­i­lar to Face­book Con­nect. This allows sites to val­i­date users’ iden­ti­ties with­out hav­ing full access to their per­sonal accounts.

ontol­ogy —  A clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem with nodes or enti­ties, that allows non-hierarchical rela­tion­ships, in con­trast to a tax­on­omy, which is hier­ar­chi­cal. Tax­onomies and ontolo­gies are impor­tant in con­tent to help related arti­cles or top­ics pages. (Also see taxonomy)

Open ID — An open stan­dard that lets users log in to mul­ti­ple web sites using the same iden­tity through a third party. It is sup­ported by numer­ous sites, includ­ing Live­Jour­nal, Yahoo!, and Word­Press. While Open ID has seen adop­tion among tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ties, its authen­ti­ca­tion method is not par­tic­u­larly intu­itive, and it has not gained wide con­sumer acceptance.

open source — Open source refers to a phi­los­o­phy and a means of devel­op­ing and licens­ing soft­ware and other copy­righted works so that oth­ers are free to inspect, use and adapt the orig­i­nal source mate­r­ial. There are many open source licenses. Some licenses are con­sid­ered per­mis­sive (e.g. MIT and BSD), allow­ing inclu­sion in pro­pri­etary works, while oth­ers (e.g. GNU GPL) require that the result­ing deriv­a­tive works remain under the same license if dis­trib­uted. While the term orig­i­nally stemmed from soft­ware prac­tices, the con­cept has now been incor­po­rated into other fields such as med­i­cine and agri­cul­ture. Many of the most pop­u­lar tech­nolo­gies used in con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion, includ­ing lan­guages and pub­lish­ing plat­forms, are open source. The glos­sary you are read­ing was devel­oped using open source method­ol­ogy and is avail­able under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

oper­at­ing sys­tem — A basic layer of soft­ware that con­trols com­puter hard­ware, allow­ing other appli­ca­tions to be built on it.  The most pop­u­lar oper­at­ing sys­tems today for desk­top com­put­ers are the var­i­ous ver­sions of Microsoft Win­dows, Mac OS X and the open-source Linux.  Smart phones also have oper­at­ing sys­tems. The Palm Pre uses webOS, numer­ous phones use Google’s Android oper­at­ing sys­tem, and the iPhone uses iOS (for­merly known as iPhone OS).

Palm Pre — A smart phone intro­duced in 2009 by Palm which uses webOS and allows for mul­ti­task­ing, unlike the iPhone. Despite rave reviews, the prod­uct is gen­er­ally acknowl­edged to have come out too late to gain mean­ing­ful trac­tion against the iPhone or Google’s Android oper­at­ing sys­tem.  HP recently announced that it would acquire Palm, which was once the lead­ing smart phone company.

peer-to-peer (P2P) — A net­work archi­tec­ture in which users share resources on their own com­put­ers directly with oth­ers. Often used to speed up videos and large mul­ti­me­dia pieces that can take a long time to down­load. Nap­ster was an early exam­ple of a pop­u­lar use of peer-to-peer archi­tec­ture, although it was not fully peer-to-peer. Today, Skype and Bit­Tor­rent are based on peer-to-peer technologies.

Perl — A dynamic lan­guage that is often used to parse and sort infor­ma­tion because of its pow­er­ful abil­i­ties in manip­u­lat­ing text. Perl can be used to pull large quan­ti­ties of data down from web­sites and stan­dard­ize and replace infor­ma­tion in batch. Perl was more pop­u­lar in past years, espe­cially in the computer-assisted report­ing com­mu­nity, but it has been over­taken in pop­u­lar­ity by lan­guages such as Python and Ruby. Perl still has an active devel­op­ment com­mu­nity and is noted for the scope of its freely avail­able libraries, which sim­plify devel­op­ment.

PHP — A pop­u­lar web script­ing lan­guage to gen­er­ate web pages that was first devel­oped in 1995, when it stood for “Per­sonal Home Page.” (It is now a recur­sive acronym, stand­ing for “PHP: Hyper­text Pre­proces­sor.”) Pop­u­lar web­sites that are writ­ten in PHP are Wikipedia, Face­book and Word­Press. It is crit­i­cized as being slow because it gen­er­ates web pages on request. How­ever, Face­book recently released its inter­nally devel­oped ver­sion of HipHop for PHP, which is designed to make the lan­guage dra­mat­i­cally more efficient.

plat­form — In the tech­nol­ogy world, plat­form refers to the hard­ware or soft­ware that other appli­ca­tions are built upon.  Com­put­ing plat­forms include Win­dows PC and Mac­in­tosh. Mobile plat­forms include Android, iPhone and Palm’s webOS. More recently, in an exten­sion of its com­monly used def­i­n­i­tion, Face­book has cre­ated a “plat­form,” allow­ing devel­op­ers to build appli­ca­tions on top of it.

Pos­ter­ous — A blog­ging and pub­lish­ing plat­form to which users can sub­mit via e-mail. Through APIs, it can push the con­tent to other sites such as Flickr, Twit­ter and YouTube. It is a for-profit com­pany based in San Fran­cisco that came out of the YCombi­na­tor seed start-up program.

Post­greSQL - An alter­na­tive to MySQL, another free and open-source rela­tional data­base man­age­ment sys­tem on the Inter­net. Post­greSQL is pre­ferred by some in the tech­nol­ogy com­mu­nity for its abil­ity to oper­ate as a spa­tial data­base, using Post­GIS exten­sions. This enables devel­op­ers to cre­ate appli­ca­tions that sort infor­ma­tion based on geog­ra­phy, which can mean sort­ing by whether var­i­ous places are within a cer­tain county or point­ing out the places that are geo­graph­i­cally clos­est to the user.

pro­gram­ming lan­guage — A spe­cial type of lan­guage used to unam­bigu­ously instruct a com­puter how to per­form tasks. Pro­gram­ming lan­guages are used by soft­ware devel­op­ers to cre­ate appli­ca­tions, includ­ing those for the web, for mobile phones, and for desk­top oper­at­ing sys­tems. C, C++, Objec­tive C, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby are exam­ples of pro­gram­ming lan­guages. HTML and XML are not pro­gram­ming lan­guages, they are markup languages.

Python — A sophis­ti­cated com­puter lan­guage that is com­monly used for Inter­net appli­ca­tions. Designed to be a very read­able lan­guage, it is named after Monty Python. It first appeared in 1991 and was orig­i­nally cre­ated by Guido van Rossum, a Dutch com­puter pro­gram­mer who now works at Google. Python files gen­er­ally end in .py.

rela­tional data­base — A piece of soft­ware that stores data in a series of tables, with rela­tion­ships defined between them. A news story might have columns for a head­line, date, text and author, where author points to another table con­tain­ing the author’s first name, last name and email address. Infor­ma­tion must be struc­tured, but this allows for pow­er­ful queries. Exam­ples include MySQL, Ora­cle, Post­greSQL and SQLite. Most mod­ern web­sites use some kind of rela­tional data­base to store con­tent.

RSS (Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion) — A stan­dard for web­sites to push their con­tent to read­ers through Web for­mats to cre­ate reg­u­lar updates through a “feed reader” or “RSS Reader.” The sym­bol is gen­er­ally a orange square with radi­at­ing white quar­ter cir­cles. (Also see Atom)

Ruby — An increas­ingly pop­u­lar pro­gram­ming lan­guage known for being pow­er­ful yet easy to write with. Orig­i­nally intro­duced in 1995 by Yuk­i­hiro “Matz” Mat­sumoto, Ruby has gained increas­ing trac­tion since 2005 because of the Ruby on Rails devel­op­ment frame­work, which can cre­ate web­sites quickly. Ruby is open source and is very pop­u­lar for content-based sites.

Ruby on Rails — A pop­u­lar Web frame­work based on the Ruby pro­gram­ming lan­guage that makes com­mon devel­op­ment tasks eas­ier “out of the box.” The power of Ruby on Rails, which was devel­oped by the Chicago-based firm 37 Sig­nals, comes from how quickly it can be used to cre­ate a basic website.

S3 — An online stor­age sys­tem run by Ama­zon that’s often used as a cheap way to store (and serve) pho­tos and videos used on web­sites. It is short for Sim­ple Stor­age Ser­vice. Its fees are often pen­nies per month per giga­byte, depend­ing on loca­tion and bulk dis­count. The ser­vice is often used in con­junc­tion with other Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, such as EC2, to allow cus­tomers to process large amounts of data with low cap­i­tal invest­ment. The New York Times used S3 with EC2 in this way to process its archives.

SaaS (Soft­ware as a Ser­vice) —  A pric­ing strat­egy and busi­ness model, where com­pa­nies build a soft­ware solu­tion, usu­ally business-to-business, and charge a fixed monthly rate to access it on the Inter­net. It is a type of cloud com­put­ing. Salesforce.com is the best exam­ple, but other nota­bles include Mailchimp and even Ama­zon Web Services.

Scribd — A document-sharing site that is often described as a “YouTube for doc­u­ments” because it allows other sites to embed its con­tent. It allows peo­ple to upload files and oth­ers to down­load in var­i­ous for­mats. Recently Scribd, which is based in San Fran­cisco, moved from Flash-based tech­nol­ogy to HTML5 standards.

script­ing lan­guage — A pro­gram­ming lan­guage designed to be easy to use for every­day or admin­is­tra­tive tasks. It may involve trade-offs such as sac­ri­fic­ing some per­for­mance for ease of pro­gram­ming. Pop­u­lar script­ing lan­guages include PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby.

SEO (Search Engine Opti­miza­tion) — A suite of tech­niques for improv­ing how a web­site ranks on search engines such as Google. SEO is often divided into “white hat” tech­niques, which (to sim­plify) try to boost rank­ing by improv­ing the qual­ity of a web­site, and “black hat” tech­niques, which try to trick search engines into think­ing a page is of higher qual­ity than it actu­ally is. SEO can also refer to indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies that offer to pro­vide search engine opti­miza­tion for websites.

SEM (Search Engine Mar­ket­ing) — A type of mar­ket­ing that involves rais­ing a com­pany or product’s vis­i­bil­ity in search engines by pay­ing to have it appear in search results for a given word.

seman­tic web — A vision of the web that is almost entirely machine read­able, in which doc­u­ments are pub­lished in lan­guages that are designed specif­i­cally for data. It was first artic­u­lated by Tim Berners-Lee in 2001. In many imple­men­ta­tions, tags would iden­tify the infor­ma­tion, such as <ADDRESS> or <DATE>. While there has been progress toward this front, many say this vision remains largely unre­al­ized.

server-side — Refer­ring to when net­work soft­ware runs in a cen­tral loca­tion, the server, rather than on the user’s com­puter, often known as the client. (Also see client side).

Sina­tra — A light­weight frame­work writ­ten in Ruby that can be used to set up web ser­vices, APIs and small sites at light­ning speed.

social graph — A map­ping of the con­nec­tions between peo­ple and the things they care about that could pro­vide use­ful insights. The term orig­i­nally pro­moted by Face­book and is now gain­ing broader usage.

social media —  A broad term refer­ring to the wide swath of con­tent cre­ation and con­sump­tion that is enabled by the many-to-many dis­trib­uted infra­struc­ture of the Inter­net. Unlike legacy media, where the audi­ence is usu­ally on the receiv­ing end of con­tent cre­ation, social media gen­er­ally allows three stages of inter­ac­tion with con­tent: 1) pro­duc­ing, 2) con­sum­ing and 3) shar­ing. Social media is incred­i­bly broad and refers to blog­ging, wikis, video-sharing sites like YouTube, photo-sharing sites like Flickr and social net­work­ing sites like Face­book and Twitter.

struc­tured the­saurus —  A group of pre­ferred terms cre­ated for edi­to­r­ial use to nor­mal­ize and more effec­tively clas­sify con­tent. For exam­ple, the AP Style­book is sim­i­lar to (but includes more rules than) a struc­tured the­saurus in that it gives writ­ers pre­ferred terms to use and stan­dards to fol­low, so every­one fol­low­ing AP Style writes the word “web­site” the same way.

tag — A com­mon type of meta­data used to describe a piece of con­tent that asso­ciates it with other con­tent that has the same tag.  Tags can be spe­cific terms, peo­ple, loca­tions, etc. used in the con­tent it is describ­ing, or more gen­eral terms that may not be explic­itly stated, such as themes. The term “tag” is also used in the con­text of markup lan­guages, such as <title> iden­ti­fy­ing the name of the web page. In HTML, tags usu­ally come in sets of open and closed, with the closed tag con­tain­ing an extra slash (“/”) inside. For exam­ple: <title>This is the Title.</title>.

tax­on­omy — A hier­ar­chi­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem. In the world of con­tent, this can be a hier­ar­chy of terms (gen­er­ally called nodes or enti­ties) that are used to clas­sify the cat­e­gory or sub­ject con­tent belongs to as well as terms that are included in the con­tent. In many cases, web­site nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems appear tax­o­nom­i­cal in that users nar­row down from broad top-level cat­e­gories to the gran­u­lar fea­ture they want to see. An ontol­ogy is sim­i­lar to a tax­on­omy in that it is also a clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem with nodes or enti­ties, but it is more com­plex and flex­i­ble because ontolo­gies allow for non-hierarchical rela­tion­ships. While in a tax­on­omy a node can be either a broader term or nar­rower term, in an ontol­ogy nodes can be related in any way.

Tum­blr — A free short-form blog­ging plat­form that allows users to post images, video, links, quotes and audio. The com­pany is based in New York City and com­petes with Pos­ter­ous.

trans­parency — In the con­text of news and infor­ma­tion, a term describ­ing open­ness about infor­ma­tion that has become increas­ingly pop­u­lar.  In many cases it is used to refer to the trans­parency of gov­ern­ment releas­ing data to jour­nal­ists and to the pub­lic. It is often used in the con­text of jour­nal­ists being open about their report­ing process and mate­r­ial by shar­ing with their read­ers before the final project emerges or pro­vid­ing more con­text in addi­tion to the final product.

Twit­ter — A microblog­ging and social media ser­vice where users can send out mes­sages lim­ited to 14o char­ac­ters. Launched in 2007, Twit­ter became pop­u­lar in part because it had a set of APIs that allowed other devel­op­ers to build tools on top if it. Twit­ter users came up with their own con­ven­tions, includ­ing the @ sym­bol to denote user names (@nytimes), and #, the hash­tag, to denote sub­jects (#sxsw). Twit­ter com­putes Trend­ing Top­ics, which give a real-time view into the most talked about top­ics on the service.

UI (User Inter­face) — The part of a soft­ware appli­ca­tion or web­site that users see and inter­act with, which takes into account the visual design and the struc­ture of the pro­gram. While graphic design is an ele­ment of user inter­face design, it is only a por­tion of the consideration.

URI (Uni­form Resource Iden­ti­fier) — The way to iden­tify the loca­tion for some­thing on the Inter­net. It is most famil­iarly in “http:” form, but also encom­passes “ftp:” or “mailto:“

URL (Uni­form Resource Loca­tor) — Often used inter­change­ably with the “address” of a web page, such as http://hackshackers.com. All URLs are URIs, but not vice versa. While humans are fami­lar with URLs as a way to see web pages, com­puter pro­grams often use URLs to pass each other machine-readable con­tent, such as RSS feeds or Twit­ter infor­ma­tion. In addi­tion, words that appear in URLs often help boost search rank­ings, which is why many con­tent sites are now shift­ing to URLs with head­lines as opposed to data strings.

UX (User Expe­ri­ence) — Gen­er­ally refer­ring to the area of design that involves the holis­tic inter­ac­tion a user has with a prod­uct or a ser­vice. It incor­po­rates many dis­ci­plines, includ­ing engi­neer­ing, graphic design, con­tent cre­ation and psy­chol­ogy. User inter­face is one ele­ment of user experience.

Web 2.0 — Refer­ring to the gen­er­a­tion of Inter­net tech­nolo­gies that allow for inter­ac­tiv­ity and col­lab­o­ra­tion on web­sites. In con­trast to Web 1.0 (roughly the first decade of the World Wide Web) where sta­tic con­tent was down­loaded into the browser and read, Web 2.0 uses the Inter­net as the plat­form. Tech­nolo­gies such as Ajax, which allow for rapid com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the browser and the web server, under­lie many Web 2.0 sites. The term was pop­u­lar­ized by a 2004 con­fer­ence, held by O’Reilly Media and Medi­aLive, called Web 2.0. (Also see Ajax)

Web 3.0 — Some­times used to refer to the seman­tic web. (Also see seman­tic web)

webOS — Oper­at­ing sys­tem used on the lat­est gen­er­a­tion of Palm smart phones, includ­ing the Pre and the Pixi. Apps for webOS are devel­oped using web stan­dards (HTML, Javascript and CSS), which means there is a low bar­rier to entry for web devel­op­ers to cre­ate mobile apps for webOS as com­pared to other mobile plat­forms. It allows for hav­ing sev­eral appli­ca­tions open at the same time, unlike the cur­rent iPhone.

wid­get — In a web con­text, this refers to a portable appli­ca­tion that can be embed­ded into a third-party site by cut­ting and past­ing snip­pets of code. Com­mon web wid­gets include a Twit­ter box that can sit on a blog, or a small Google Map that sits within an invi­ta­tion. Desk­top wid­gets, such as ones offered for the Mac­in­tosh Dash­board or by Yahoo!, can be placed on the desk­top of a com­puter, such as for weather or stocks. Sim­i­larly, Android offers the abil­ity to add wid­gets to the home screens.

wiki — A web site with pages that can be eas­ily edited by vis­i­tors using their web browser, but gen­er­ally now gain­ing accep­tance as a pre­fix to mean “col­lab­o­ra­tive.” Ward Cun­ning­ham cre­ated the first wiki, nam­ing it Wiki­Wiki­Web after the Hawai­ian word for “quick.” A wiki enables the audi­ence to con­tribute to a knowl­edge base on a topic or share infor­ma­tion within an orga­ni­za­tion, like a news­room. The best-known wiki in exis­tence is Wikipedia, which burst onto the scene around 2000 as one of the first exam­ples of mass col­lab­o­ra­tive infor­ma­tion aggre­ga­tion. Other sites that have been branded “wiki” include Wikinews, Wik­i­travel, and Wik­iLeaks (which was orig­i­nally but is no longer a wiki).

Word­Press — The most pop­u­lar blog­ging soft­ware in use today, in large part because it is free and rel­a­tively pow­er­ful, yet easy to use. First released by Matt Mul­len­weg in 2003, Word­Press attracts con­tri­bu­tions from a large com­mu­nity of pro­gram­mers and design­ers who give it addi­tional func­tion­al­ity and visual themes. Sites that use Word­Press include the New York Times blogs, CNN and the LOL­Cats net­work. It has been crit­i­cized for secu­rity flaws.

XML (Exten­si­ble Markup Lan­guage) —A set of rules for encod­ing doc­u­ments and data that goes beyond HTML capac­i­ties. Whereas HTML is gen­er­ally con­cerned with the seman­tic struc­ture of doc­u­ments, XML allows other infor­ma­tion to be defined and passed such as <vehi­cle>, <make>, <model>, <year>, <color> for a car. It is the par­ent lan­guage of many XML-based lan­guages such as RSS, Atom, and oth­ers. It gained fur­ther pop­u­lar­ity with the emer­gence of Ajax as a way to send back data from web ser­vices, but has since lost ground to JSON, another data encod­ing for­mat, which is seen as eas­ier to work with.

Yahoo! Pipes — An online ser­vice from Yahoo! that pro­vides a drag-and-drop visual inter­face to cre­ate inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tions of data.  This is stuff you would oth­er­wise need to know how to pro­gram to do. Instead, inputs, oper­a­tors and chunks of logic are rep­re­sented visu­ally — as con­soles con­nected by pipes — with infor­ma­tion flow­ing from sources to out­put. It can import and out put in almost any com­mon data for­mat, includ­ing RSS, CSV, and JSON. Yahoo Pipes is an excel­lent resources for tech-minded, non-programming journalists.

________________________

Now More Context!

We relate the dif­fer­ent terms to each other and make sense of the whole thing.

- Ruby, PHP and Python are all script­ing lan­guages that are com­monly used in web­site devel­op­ment. PHP is used in Word­Press and Dru­pal. Ruby is the basis
for Ruby on Rails, a web frame­work. Python is the basis for Django.

- Ruby on Rails and Django are sim­i­lar and often con­sid­ered rival sys­tems because they both use a “Model, View, Con­troller” archi­tec­ture. This means they are designed to sep­a­rate the data (model) from the analy­sis of the data (con­troller) and its pre­sen­ta­tion to the user (view). Typ­i­cally the model is stored in a data­base, the view is stored in html tem­plates, and the con­troller is imple­mented directly in the under­ly­ing pro­gram­ming lan­guage (Ruby for Ruby on Rails, Python for Django).

- XML and JSON are dif­fer­ent ways of  inter­chang­ing infor­ma­tion. JSON is con­sid­ered the bet­ter data exchange for­mat whereas XML is con­sid­ered a bet­ter doc­u­ment exchange format.

- Word­Press, Joomla and Dru­pal (listed in increas­ingly lev­els of com­plex­ity) are all con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems writ­ten in PHP.

- HTML5, which allows for more sophis­ti­cated use of graph­ics and videos in web pages,  is con­sid­ered an open stan­dards rival to Flash, which is pro­pri­etary tech­nol­ogy devel­oped by Adobe Sys­tems. Microsoft Sil­verlight is also a rival to Flash, but don’t worry if you have never heard of it.

- Face­book Con­nect, OAuth, and OpenID are dif­fer­ent ways that users can use one account’s infor­ma­tion to log onto another web­site with­out hav­ing to cre­ate a new user­name and password.

_____

•  Ver­sion 1.0, released June 22, 2010 under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion Share-Alike 3.0 License (dis­trib­ute this list as much as you please as long as you attribute it to Hacks/Hackers, and any changes/corrections you make also become freely share­able).

• Con­trib­u­tors: Jen­nifer 8. Lee, Burt Her­man, Robin Smail, David Cohn, Michelle Minkoff, Michael Dono­hoe, Greg Linch, John Keefe, Philip Neustrom, Chris Amico, Ash­ley Marty, Mor­gan Sully, Shmuel Ross, Paul Hen­rich, Dave Good­child, Michele McLel­lan, Jes­sica Chapel and [YOUR NAME COULD BE HERE].

• Ques­tions, cor­rec­tions, com­ments? Email glossary@hackshackers.com



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Susan Older Founder Dis­placed­Jour­nal­ists™and its par­ent companyReal World Media™

    Is there life – or work – after news­pa­pers? A lot of us are in the process of find­ing out. Because it’s gen­er­ally a some­what lonely endeavor, it struck me, in Jan­u­ary 2010, that it might be com­fort­ing – and pos­si­bly very pro­duc­tive – to go through it together.

    Dis­placed Jour­nal­ists is a com­mu­nity – our com­mu­nity – where we find com­mon ground, where we can begin to pick our­selves up, dust our­selves off and get on with our lives and liveli­hoods. [more]

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