A Social Media Glossary – Part 1

Before I wrote my first blog, I spent a lot of time looking at other blogs. I found that one of the most daunting aspects of negotiating the blogosphere was the entirely new language you had to master in order to understand what everyone was talking about. (Yes, folks, there was a time when I couldn’t tell an RSS feed from a wiki.)

I would bet that’s true for many CEOs … at least those of us who are not “techno-geeks.” So, in the interest of public service, I thought it might be helpful — and fun — to periodically showcase acronyms, words and phrases that have their own special meaning on the web. Today’s selection:

• Aggregator: Also known as news aggregator and feed reader; a tool for gathering updated content from blogs and other websites and posting it to a single location for easy viewing. My Yahoo! and Google Alerts have built-in aggregators.



• AstroTurfing: A fake grassroots initiative designed to generate online “buzz” about a product, service or idea. Typically the authors of this kind of campaign try to remain anonymous.



• E-mail Bankruptcy: The condition of being so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the email in your inbox that you just delete or archive everything without bothering to read it.



• Folksonomy: Also known as social classification and collaborative tagging; the use of tags, labels or keywords by creators and consumers of content to classify information. Flickr and del.icio.us are examples of websites that rely upon folksonomy to organize their content.



• Googleganger: A person with your name who turns up in the search list, when you Google yourself. (I don’t have one myself; but my assistant, Helene, has a googleganger who’s an award-winning weaver in Wisconsin!)



• Linkrot: Links that formerly worked, but no longer do, because the original web page has been moved or deleted.



• Lurk: To read without contributing or adding comments to online communities, thereby being effectively invisible to the rest of the group. Lurking can be a good thing, enabling you to learn the culture and unwritten rules of the group and the personalities of the other members before you make a comment.



• Meme: An idea that seems to propagate itself within a culture or from blog to blog.



• NSFW: Not Safe For Work; used to describe Internet content that’s inappropriate for the workplace



• SEO: Search Engine Optimization; techniques designed to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines using targeted keywords



Technorati Tags: blogosphere, techno-geeks, aggregator, feed reader, news aggregator, AstroTurfing, e-mail bankruptcy, folksonomy, social classification, collaborative tagging, googleganger, linkrot, lurk, business, communications, public relations