Increase your Web Savvy Vocabulary

I put a previous post here http://brianleesblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-church-uses-internet-to-preach.html about how a church, in this instance the United Church of God (www.ucg.org) is using the internet to preach the gospel. In the article below, there is an explaination of some of the terms used in doing this. I hope you find this interesting!!

Increase Your Web-Savvy Vocabulary
by Elizabeth Cannon
Viral posting? RSS? Twitter? With all of these new words and ideas, it seems like the Internet is creating its own language! To help you make sense of this new Web lingo, read this short list of key terms you need to know when sharing UCG Web sites, publications and videos on the Internet.

RSS Feed
When you subscribe to a newsletter, you expect to receive regular updates on events and news. An RSS feed does the same thing but with Web sites. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you will be provided with frequent updates to any changes or additions made to the Web site. Popular sites that offer ways to read these updates are iGoogle, My Yahoo or My MSN, which put content such as news, weather and stock quotes on a user's personal page.
You can receive updates to new content on our Web sites by subscribing to any of the Web sites' RSS feeds. Just look for this icon.

Bookmarking
Just as you would put a bookmark in a book to save your place in a story, social bookmarking on the Internet is a way for you to save your place on your favorite Web sites. Think of it as a list of Web pages that you want to remember to visit. An added benefit to online bookmarking is that it allows you to store, organize, search and manage your bookmarks of Web pages.
There are plenty of online services to choose from, such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Furl or Newsvine. All you have to do to bookmark UCG Web pages is get an account with one of these services and then click on the “ShareThis” link on any of the UCG Web pages.
By bookmarking and rating a Web page, you are also telling the Internet community that this is a Web page that should be visited.

Social Networking Site
Your social circles include anyone—from friends and family to coworkers, classmates and acquaintances—with whom you share interests. Social networking sites have now made it easier to keep in touch and share information with those social circles by creating easy-to-use Web sites solely focused on creating an online community. On these networking sites you can post pictures, send messages, share music, videos and Web sites with all of your friends who are part of your online network. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter are four of the major social networking sites on the Internet.

Viral
Think about the last time a pesky flu bug was going around the office. First one person came to work with a cough and the sniffles. Then two people, then four people, and on it went until the whole office was sick with the same symptoms.
Now take this concept and apply it to your bookmarks and your social networking site. Once you have bookmarked a GN commentary and have shared it with your friends on your social networking site, you have just initiated the first step to making that GN commentary go viral. Now that your friends have access to it, they can watch it, increasing its popularity on the Internet, and share it with their social network, who can, in turn, share it with their social network and so on and so forth. Suddenly the GN commentary has spread like a virus.

Posting
When you want to share a GN commentary, you have the option of putting a link to the commentary right on your social networking site. This is called posting a link. Most social networking sites have an easy-to-find section such as on Facebook that helps you to post a link.
By posting a link, you are making it easier for friends in your network to watch the GN commentary by making it easily accessible to them on your social networking page. UN

http://www.ucg.org/un/un0903/increase-your-web-savvy-vocabulary.htm