All that fuzz over the term ‘Web 2.0’ has reduced it to a mere buzzterm, a misnomer without clear intention. Heck, even ‘buzzterm’ and ‘buzzword’ got caught in the crossfire as innocent, excessively worn-out casualties. Hopefully, the following terms that are associated with it do not suffer the same fate.
Semantic — An adjective that web designers and developers keep in mind when creating web applications and experiences that are SEO-friendly, easily maintainable, and standards-compliant. Commonly found inside the semantic bowl of alphabet soup are xHTML, CSS, XML, and RDF.
Folksonomy — A means of classifying and categorizing data on the web through collaborative efforts from the online community. This is more commonly known as (though not strictly synonymous to) ‘tagging’.
Asynchronous — The method of sending data to and from the web server that eliminates the need to re-transmit data for the whole page, and allows for “refreshless browsing”. This is the concept around which AJAX and its derivatives revolve.
Mashup — The compounding (“mashing”) of two or more pieces of complementing web functionalities to create a powerful web application. This is usually achieved through the use of APIs.
Some Rights Reserved — A concept initiated by Creative Commons that builds upon traditional copyright practices and relaxes restrictions to promote creative freedom. CC licenses aim at maintaining the balance between an end-user’s free use and an author’s Intellectual Property Rights.
Syndication — Making information on a website available (preferrably in digest form) for a wide range of uses, prime examples of which are RSS and Atom feeds. Syndication is a great way of making news updates, blog entries and podcasts immediately available to a Web audience.
Cool. This will be useful!
Great glossary, I found it helpful and useful. Thanks
Savoy Sison
Excellent. This is really helpful.
Great. This really helps me quite a bit.
How useful was this…it beats reading the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 stuff..thinking I ’sort’ of know what they are talking about…
Very useful for clearing up commonly misused terms, and also taught me new terms I hadn’t heard of. Thanks!
was useful.
Nice article, I hadn’t heard of “folksonomy” yet :-)
Has anyone noticed that, since web 2.0, the word “semantic” is being used in a quite strange way? In web talk, something can apparently be “more semantic” than something else.
Which is quite strange because the word “semantic” just means “being related to semantics, the study of meaning”.
In this new web-sense, the word seems to signify that something (e.g. a piece of code) is “meaningful” or “being used with the right semantic function”.