v-Fluence Glossary of Terms

Atom - n. An evolving protocol for syndication and sharing of content. Atom is being developed as a succesor to and improvement over RSS and is more complex than RSS while offering support for additional features such digital signatures, geographic location of author, possibly security/encryption, licensing, etc. Like RSS, Atom is an XML-based specification. Read this article about Atom to learn more.

BBS - n. Bulletin Board System. Also referred to as message boards, discussion forums, and online forums. All these terms refer to an electronic message center. Most bulletin boards serve specific interest groups and are located on the host organization's Web site.

Blog - n. Web Log. A blog refers to a journal that is maintained on the Internet. There are various forms of blogs including personal blogs, which are kept by individuals and community blogs, which are blogs maintained by groups of individuals.

Cookie - n. A small piece of text sent by a server to your browser that is designed to keep track of your profile and certain online activities you are involved in. They are not generally considered a security risk, although some users may consider them an invasion of privacy. To access many news sites requiring registration, you will need to have cookies enabled.

Cyberspace - n. Term originated by author William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, the word Cyberspace is currently used to describe the whole range of information resources available through computer networks.

Directory - n. Directories, unlike search engines, are produced by hand, with people filtering and classifying resources and, in some cases, annotating and rating them. You pick the subject heading that most closely matches the subject of your search, then browse the results or drill down through deeper levels of category headings. DMOZ, Yahoo and Looksmart are the most important Internet directories.

DNS - n. Domain Name System (or Service). Internet service that translates domain names both to and from IP addresses.

Fire Wall - n. A combination of hardware and software that separates a network into two or more parts for security purposes. (Zone Alarm is a an excellent fire wall program available for free download.)

internet (Lower case i) - n. Any time you connect 2 or more networks together, you have an internet - as in inter-national or inter-state.

Internet (Upper case I) - n. The vast collection of inter-connected networks that are connected using the TCP/IP protocols and that evolved from the ARPANET of the late 60's and early 70's. The Internet connects tens of thousands of independent networks into a vast global internet and is probably the largest Wide Area Network in the world.

Internet meme - n. An object of interest on the Internet that self-propagates in a viral manner.

IP - n. Internet Protocol. The main network transmission protocol on the Internet.

Listserv - n. Listservs use Internet e-mail to facilitate discussion. Listservs are managed by software that resides on a server. The software manages subscriptions to a mailing list along with subscriber access to the list's various functions.

RSS - n. A commonly used protocol for syndication and sharing of content, originally developed to facilitate the syndication of news articles, now widely used to share the contents of blogs. RSS is an XML-based summary of a web site, usually used for syndication and other kinds of content-sharing. There are RSS "feeds" which are sources of RSS information about web sites, and RSS "readers" which read RSS feeds and display their content to users. See this article about RSS to learn more.

Search Engine - n. A program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves.

Usenet Newsgroups - n. Usenet newsgroups are discussion forums that individuals access using the Internet depending on their key areas of interest. These newsgroups are now operated as Google Groups, making them easy to search for particular keywords.

XML - n. Extensensible Markup Language, or XML, is a markup language that provides a rich system for sharing complex data structures and documents across multiple platforms. XML separates content from layout, allowing data to be displayed differently according to the platform it is viewed on.

Wiki - n. Wiki is a piece of software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Not only can editors manage content with Wiki; but they can also manage the way in which the information is organized and presented. Such open source editing has led to the creation of the world's largest online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. To learn more about Wikis, read this article on our Resources page.

Some of the above definitions were derived from the Glossary of Internet Terms by Mattise Enzer. You may copy and redistribute this Glossary only under the terms of the Open Content License.