“Happy Monday everyone!! I can’t believe it’s already October 19th, but it’s finally starting to feel like fall here in good ol’ Savannah. I’d like to start today’s blog out with a personal story.
My favorite teacher ever was my high school chorus teacher. She and I were very, very close and even after I went off to college, we would periodically make sure we got together for lunch or dinner when I was home for holidays. Unfortunately, life got to be pretty busy and we eventually lost touch. A couple of months ago, though, her son informed me that she had just joined Facebook. I immediately sent her a friend request and we began messaging eachother to catch up. In one of our messages, she posed this question: "Ginny, what does it mean to ‘poke’ someone on Facebook?" As I tried to explain the meaning of a "poke," I found it very difficult to do so. What did it really mean to poke someone? I had just never really thought about it before because I never really had to. And then it hit me: there must be a lot more terms just like "poke" that newcomers to Facebook, Twitter, etc, just don’t know. The lingo these sites use probably seems like an entire new language that could make any newcomer to social media feel lost and intimidated.
That’s why I developed a list of vocabulary terms (with the help of wikipedia, of course) that I think are important for any newbies to understand Facebook, Twitter, and blogging. These are just some of the many, but they are helpful nonetheless. Enjoy!”
Facebook Vocabulary
Applications- fun, interactive details/objects that you may add to your profile that help communicate your style personality, and interests to your friends in your network
Discussion Board- an area where a Page’s fans can engage in topic-based dialogue
Inbox- much like your email inbox, this is where you can send and receive messages that require a little more privacy than you’d get from a wall post
News Feed- a tickertape of your activities on Facebook
Pages- created by companies, organizations, musicians, politicians, etc, these pages allow Facebook members to becomes fans of a page to communicate their support the group, company, etc, and to interact with other members who share their sentiments
Poke- a gesture, symbolizing a physical poke, that lets your friends know you’re thinking about them without saying a word
Profile- your personal space on Facebook where your friends can contact you, leave you messages, view and interact with your applications
Status- How are you feeling? What are you doing? Let your friends in on your activities and whereabouts by updating your profile status.
Tag- identifying the people you know in your posted photos so that others may see these pictures of them as well
Wall- a public space on your profile that your friends can interact with by writing on it
Twictionary (Twitter Dictionary)
Tweet- n: single message seen on Twitter, v: act of posting to Twitter
Tweeter- n: a Twitter user; a person who tweets
RT- Retweet: tweeting content posted by another user
Twitterverse- (n) The body of Twitter users or community, similar to "blogosphere”
@name- Addresses a tweet to a specific user or mentions them
DM- Direct Message: the way to send a private message on Twitter
Twitter handle- your twitter username
URL Shortener- a website that will allow you to shorten a URL for better use of the 140 characters Twitter provides
TwitPic- a picture uploaded to Twitter
Blog Vocabulary
Blogger- a person who runs a blog
Blogroll- A list of blogs on a blog (usually placed in the sidebar of a blog) that reads as a list of recommendations by the blogger of other blogs
Blogosphere- All blogs, or the blogging community
Post- An entry written and published to a blog
RSS- Really Simple Syndication is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts
RSS Feed- The file containing a blog’s latest posts. It is read by an RSS aggregator/reader and shows at once when a blog has been updated. It may contain only the title of the post, the title plus the first few lines of a post, or the entire post
Subscribe- The term used when a blogs feed is added to a feed reader like Bloglines or Google. Some blogging platforms have internal subscriptions, this allows readers to receive notification when there are new posts in a blog