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WebSpeak

Home > Online & Multimedia > WebSpeak
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Ellyn Angelotti
Dana Eagles of the Orlando Sentinel defines common Web terms to create an online journalism glossary.
Tweet (and other Twitter lingo)
Thanks to @barbaranixon for the inspiration with her Twitter lexicon blog post.
RELATED
* Newsies Twittering on Twitter by Mallary Tenore
A few key terms you need to know to understand the Twitter world (Twittertopia?).

Tweet: Your 140-character (or shorter) message
Tweep: Someone you know on Twitter
@ : The symbol that precedes the name of a person you’re replying to
Twoops: Accidentally sending a direct (private) message publicly

Follow Poynter on Twitter @poynter.

Posted by Ellyn Angelotti 9:47 AM August 6, 2008
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HTML
HTML is the computer language used to create documents on the Web. HTML, which stands for "hypertext markup language," tells a Web browser how to display text and images. You can see the complex code that underlies a Web page by clicking “Source” in the View menu of Internet Explorer.
Posted at 10:00 AM July 29, 2008
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Terms of Service
Terms of service are the "fine print" rules that online publishers establish and that users "agree" to follow in exchange for benefiting from the services the site provides. Though seldom read by users (and hard to find on on most sites), terms of service cover such matters as copying or appropriating the site’s content, the publisher’s liability, users’ privacy and guidelines for user-generated content.

More reading:    
LATimes.com terms of service
Posted at 9:52 AM July 25, 2008
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FTP
FTP stands for file transfer protocol. In essence, it’s a set of rules governing the exchange of files between computers over a network such as the Internet. FTP is commonly used to download files from a server. The address of an FTP site starts with ftp: rather than the more familiar http: .
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Posted at 9:53 AM July 15, 2008
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Technorati
Technoratiis a search engine devoted to finding and organizing content in the ever-expanding blogosphere – including the thousands of blogs hosted by news organizations. Although Technorati made its name with blogs, it has expanded to include the search for photos, video and music shared on social networking sites. Other search engines are devoted to blog content, too, including Google’s Blog Search.
Posted at 9:47 AM July 8, 2008
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Blogroll
A blogroll is a list of links in which a blogger points readers to related blogs. It says, in effect, if you liked my blog, you might be interested in these others, too. A blogroll typically runs down the side of a blog page.
Posted at 2:48 PM July 1, 2008
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Do Follow Blog Squidoo have intergrated Blogroll into their program naming it LensRoll!!... More.
Read All Comments (1 comments)
TrackBack
A TrackBack is an automated notification that lets one blog let another blog know it’s being linked to, thus facilitating “conversations” between blogs. Say, for example, that a food blog publishes a post with a link to a wine blog. The wine blog is alerted to this and may automatically publish a comment with an excerpt and a link back to the food blog’s post. This lets the authors and readers of the wine blog know that the food blog is discussing the wine blog’s content.
Posted at 9:45 AM June 26, 2008
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Chicklet
A chicklet is the small icon, or button, often seen on Web pages and blogs indicating that users can subscribe to a feed of the type of content displayed there – such as postings to a blog. Clicking on the button allows you to subscribe through formats such as RSS and Atom.
Posted at 5:39 PM June 16, 2008
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Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro is an Apple software program widely used in newsrooms to edit video shot by photographers and reporters for posting on news sites. It's an example of a non-linear editing program, which allows the editor to access frames regardless of where they fall within the video clip and to move them around easily.
More reading:Knight Digital Media Center tutorial
Posted at 2:28 PM June 3, 2008
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Photo Gallery
A photo gallery is a collection of pictures offering a variety of views of an event or situation -– and allowing photographers to display much more of their work than could be accommodated on any given page of a Web site. Although most photo galleries have captions and allow users to advance through a series of pictures, they are simpler to produce than slide shows, which rely on audio and timed transitions along with images to tell a story.
 
Posted at 1:49 PM May 27, 2008
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Cutaway
A cutaway is a shot in a video that interrupts the main flow of action to focus on something else, such as a detail that illustrates something being talked about in an interview. Cutaways, which are inserted during editing, add visual information, provide a diversion and serve as a transition between fragments of an interview.
Posted at 7:59 AM May 20, 2008
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Podcast
A podcast is an audio presentation that can be listened to through a computer or a portable media player. The term is a compression of the words iPod (the most popular portable player) and broadcast. Using services such as iTunes, listeners can subscribe to podcasts so that they automatically receive the latest feeds from podcasters. A variant of the podcast is the video podcast, also known as (you guessed it) the vodcast.
More:
New York Times podcasts
NPR podcasts
Posted at 4:15 PM May 12, 2008
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Database
A database is a collection of related records that are stored in a computer and can be extracted using criteria the user specifies. A common type is a relational database, which uses tables to organize the data. Many news Web sites have built and maintained collections of databases that allow their readers to easily cut through mounds of public records and find the information that relates to their lives -– from crime reports to restaurant inspections and more.
Examples:
 
 
Posted at 2:56 PM May 5, 2008
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Audacity
Audacity is an audio editing software program that can be downloaded and used free of charge. Relatively simple to learn and use on either PCs or Macs, it has been widely adopted by journalists for editing audio files to be posted online or added to slide shows and other multimedia presentations.
More reading:
Audacity download
Super-Fast Guide to Audio Editing (Mindy McAdams)
Posted at 4:52 PM April 28, 2008
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Voice-over
Voice-over is narration on a video or slide show, often provided by a reporter, that provides context for an online news package. A voice-over, or V/O, ties together images as well as other audio, such as interviews and natural sound, the background sounds that lend authenticity.
Posted at 5:56 PM April 22, 2008
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Panning
Panning is the action a videographer takes in moving the camera horizontally, usually from a fixed position, and resulting in a panoramic shot. By contrast, the movement of a video camera up and down is called tilting.
Posted at 1:10 PM April 8, 2008
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Slideshow
A slideshow is an online series of still images used to tell a story, usually with captions and often with audio. Slideshows (the term pays homage to those old transparencies shown with carousel projectors) may include interviews, natural sound, narration by a reporter or photographer, and even music.Although slideshows can be created in various programs, Soundslides has become the standard tool for journalist-produced audio slide shows, owing to its low cost and ease of use.
More reading:
Soundslides and the Rise of the Audio Slideshow (Digital Photography Insights)
Posted at 5:35 PM March 31, 2008
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Usability
Usability refers to how easily and intuitively a user can interact with a Web site. Highly usable sites allow users to to quickly and easily accomplish tasks -- find a story about a particular sports team, send a letter to the editor or post a comment, for example. The design, navigation and organization of content on a site are instrumental in making it user-friendly. Usability also extends to how users who are visually impaired or come from different cultures use the site. Before new features are launched, Web sites sometimes bring in test users to try out the site. Metrics, eye-tracking studies and heat maps also can help assess how users interact with a site.
More reading:
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen�s site
Government guide to usability
Posted at 10:56 AM March 26, 2008
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Pay Per Click
Pay per click is a type of online advertising in which an advertiser pays a Web publisher every time a visitor "clicks through" to the advertiser's Web site. PPC ads, which are widely used on search engines as well as on content sites and blogs, are increasingly popular because advertisers pay only for the traffic the ad generates.

Posted at 3:23 PM March 18, 2008
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Netiquette
Netiquette, a compression of network etiquette, refers to the basic principles of good behavior in writing e-mails and posting messages online. Netiquette advises Web users to avoid rudeness, respect privacy and tolerate other viewpoints in online communications.Although the concept of netiquette is as old as the Internet itself, news sites continue to struggle with where to draw the line on offensive postings as they strive to maintain a balance between openness and civility.
More reading:
The Core Rules of Netiquette (Virginia Shea)
Posted at 3:31 PM March 10, 2008
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Wiki
A wiki is an application that allows Web users to contribute to a site and edit its content. Collaborative Web sites based on the wiki principle are themselves known as wikis, a term derived from the Hawaiian word for �quick.� The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, the comprehensive online encyclopedia whose underlying philosophy is that a community of users will correct errors even though contributions aren't subject to the verification found in traditional publishing. But the wiki concept is also used for other public sites and for corporate intranets -- often moderated by editors.
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Posted at 9:40 AM March 7, 2008
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Stickiness
Stickiness is the degree to which a Web site keeps visitors coming back and gets them to stick around for a while every time. Sticky Web sites offer new and compelling information, entertainment and social contact that engage people time after time. Some of them also store personal data in accounts, making it more convenient to return to that site than to try a competitive site where data would have to be re-entered.
More reading:
How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free (New York Times)
Posted at 12:03 PM March 3, 2008
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Heat Map
A heat map is a graphical representation of how many Web site users are clicking on various parts of a Web page. The darker the shading, the more clicks. A heat map of a news site shows an online editor in real time what items are of greatest interest to readers and can provide insight on how users navigate the site.

An example of a heat map:
Webspeak Heat Map

Posted at 6:42 PM February 24, 2008
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Microjournalism
Microjournalism describes the new phenomenon of reporting via text messages that are distributed by microblogging services such as Twitter.Some reporters have used these postings, known as tweets in Twitter-land, to provide the latest news from the presidential campaign trail. Given that these updates are limited to 140 characters and are usually filed on tiny Blackberry keyboards, they provide an especially roughdraft of history.
More reading:
Campaign Reporting in Under 140 Taps (New York Times)
Posted at 4:25 PM February 21, 2008
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B-Roll

B-roll is secondary footage in an online news video that provides a visual explanation of an issue or event and helps to tell the story. A video about a new fire station, for example, might include the fire chief talking about how it will improve safety in a neighborhood. The video editor might use B-roll of workers finishing the station to "cover" part of the interview with the fire chief, so that the Web user hears the fire chief while seeing the fire station's completion. B-roll lends variety and visual detail to news video and provides relief from talking heads.

Posted at 2:33 PM February 14, 2008
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Reverse Publishing
Reverse publishing is the practice of repackaging information originally gathered for, or contributed to, a news Web site and publishing it in print. It’s the reverse of the more typical path in which newspapers shovel print content onto their Web sites. Blog postings, community calendar items and user-contributed photos are just a few of the items that are published first on the Web and then edited for the smaller news hole of print.
Posted at 10:23 AM February 11, 2008
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Cookies
Cookies are files placed on users' computers by a Web site. Cookies can be used to store information the user provides to a site and save the user's preferences. Cookies are often a component of online shopping carts and can be used to enhance a user's experience with a Web site. However, cookies are also a source of privacy concerns because they can track Web sites the user has visited. Cookies are not viruses, and users can choose how and when to accept them by changing the Web browser's settings.
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Posted at 3:05 PM February 6, 2008
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Web Scraping
Web scraping, sometimes known as harvesting, is the automated process of finding content on Web pages and converting it into another form for use on another Web site.The appropriation of some content may be legally or ethically questionable, but not all Web scraping is unsavory.A news site may, for example, regularly scrape public records on government Web sites for information it pours intodatabases that allow users to more easily check a contractor’s background, say, or the amount of crime in a neighborhood.
More reading:
Should Web Giants Let Startups Use the Information They Have About You? (Wired)
Posted at 5:53 PM January 31, 2008
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PDF
YOUR WORDS DEFINED
Do you have a word that you'd like the WebSpeak crew to help you define? Send us an email.

* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

* Subscribe to the WebSpeak RSS feed.
Almost every Web user has opened a PDF, but how many can say what that means? PDF stands for Portable Document Format – a standard file format that allows Web publishers to post documents viewable by any user who installs a copy of the free Acrobat Reader. The PDF version of a document captures original formatting and looks the same as it did in the program in which it was created. So you can see the document in its original form regardless of the kind of computer or software you have.

 

 

Posted at 4:05 PM January 28, 2008
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The Long Tail
YOUR WORDS DEFINED
Do you have a word that you'd like the WebSpeak crew to help you define? Send us an email.

* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

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Long Tail is a term coined by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson in 2004 to describe the business models of online companies such as Amazon and Netflix. The Long Tail model, popularized in a 2006 book, argues that large amounts of content in low demand can, collectively, rival the competitive market for the most popular content. For a site such as Netflix, requests for hard-to-find niche titles create a market that can rival requests for new releases, which can usually be found in brick-and-mortar video stores. On a news site, the most in-demand content might be breaking news, while the Long Tail content might be unique, low-traffic evergreen information, niche content and archival material.
More reading:
The Long Tail blog and book site
Original Long Tail article in Wired

Posted at 4:26 PM January 24, 2008
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Spider
YOUR WORDS DEFINED
Do you have a word that you'd like the WebSpeak crew to help you define? Send us an email.

* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

* Subscribe to the WebSpeak RSS feed.
A spider, also known as a crawler or ant, is a program that makes methodical searches of the World Wide Web to provide information about pages for search engines. Spiders use hyperlinks from pages they find to identify even more pages, and all the information is returned to a central point for indexing by the search engine.
More reading:
Posted at 4:15 PM January 24, 2008
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Micro-blogging
Micro-blogging is a variant of traditional blogging in which users write brief text messages over the Web.
YOUR WORDS DEFINED
Do you have a word that you'd like the WebSpeak crew to help you define? Send us an email.

* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

* Subscribe to the WebSpeak RSS feed.
Micro-blogging was popularized by the Web site Twitter, which launched in July 2006 and limits users to 140-character updates. The updates can be made using mobile devices, e-mail and other tools. On Twitter, users commonly refer to their postings as tweets. Several news sites, including The New York Times, USA Today, the BBC and the Orlando Sentinel, have a presence on Twitter, where they post breaking news and other updates. Popular micro-blogging sites include Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.
More reading:
Your Guide to Micro-Blogging and Twitter (MediaShift)
Twittervision
Posted at 11:55 AM January 14, 2008
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Content Management System
A content management system, or CMS, is a program for easily editing and placing content such as text, still images and videos on Web sites.  
YOUR WORDS DEFINED
Do you have a word that you'd like the WebSpeak crew to help you define? Send us an email.

* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

* Subscribe to the WebSpeak RSS feed.
The CMS serves as a bridge between editors and the code running the Web site, limiting or eliminating the need for editors to know HTML or other computer languages. Most news sites use a CMS to efficntly manage a large amount of content. Some news sites use proprietary systems, while others use open-source systems such as Drupal. Blogs and wikis are also content management systems in that they allow users to post and edit entries using a graphical interface.
More reading:
List of content management systems (Wikipedia)
Posted at 11:53 AM January 14, 2008
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HTTP
YOUR WORDS DEFINED
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* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

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The letters HTTP found at the start of most Web addresses (even if you don’t actually type them into your browser) stand for HyperText Transfer Protocol. HTTP is essentially a standardized collection of rules that allow computers to request and receive information from each other. Web users rely on HTTP to retrieve pages from servers at the addresses they place in their browsers.
More reading:
The Difference Between FTP and HTTP (Webopedia)
Posted at 11:49 AM January 14, 2008
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Geocoding

YOUR WORDS DEFINED
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* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

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Geocoding is the process of assigning geographic coordinates (the latitude and longitude of a location) to street addresses and other geographic features so that they can be displayed in online maps. This enables Web sites to show the location of news events or display data such as crimes and real estate transactions.
 More reading:
 
Posted at 11:04 AM December 19, 2007
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SMS Alert

YOUR WORDS DEFINED
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* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

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An SMS alert is a text message sent to users of mobile devices. Many news sites regularly send breaking-news SMS (Short Message Service) alerts to a list of subscribers. As the use and sophistication of mobile devices increase, news organizations are making it a priority to deliver timely and appealing content.
More reading:
Yahoo! Alerts
Dallas Morning News Alerts
Posted at 2:40 PM December 17, 2007
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Recent Comments:
SMS Those are strict standards that are grist for any court... More.
Read All Comments (1 comments)
Tag Cloud
 
YOUR WORDS DEFINED
Do you have a word that you'd like the WebSpeak crew to help you define? Send us an email.

* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

* Subscribe to the WebSpeak RSS feed.
A tag cloud is a grouping of tags, or keywords, in which font size indicates the relative frequency of a tag. Within the cloud, the tags link to associated content. By looking at a tag cloud, a Web user can instantly get a sense of how much content a site has on various topics.
More reading:
Freakonomics tag cloud (scroll to bottom right)
Flickr's all-time most popular tags
Posted at 2:39 PM December 17, 2007
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CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, a language that allows designers to exercise more flexibility and functionality on their Web pages.
YOUR WORDS DEFINED
Do you have a word that you'd like the WebSpeak crew to help you define? Send us an email.

* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

* Subscribe to the WebSpeak RSS feed.
CSS, an essential tool for any Web designer, can be used to alter colors, layout, images, fonts, spacing and more. CSS allows designers to separate design elements (such as background images, margins and even the layout of the page) from the content of the page (such as text and photos). It also can be used to serve up multiple versions of a design for different devices.
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Posted at 2:35 PM December 17, 2007
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Flash
Flash is a multimedia authoring program developed by Adobe that enables designers to tell interactive, multimedia stories on the Web. Flash presentations can bring together text, photos, data files, video, audio and animated graphics to deliver information in a non-linear format, allowing the user to sample various aspects of the story at will. Flash can be used to create complex and visually rich games, slide shows, interactive infographics and much more. Flash presentations offered by news sites often are produced as interactive complements to the traditional investigative and explanatory projects they produce for print.
More reading:
Flash Journalism (Mindy McAdams)
Online News Association Awards (scroll to Outstanding Use of Digital Media)
Posted at 2:32 PM December 17, 2007
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Mojo
YOUR WORDS DEFINED
Do you have a word that you'd like the WebSpeak crew to help you define? Send us an email.

* For more online journalism tips, read Chip Scanlan's ABCs of Online Writing.

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A mojo is a “mobile journalist” who works out of a car, using laptop computers, digital cameras and audio recorders to file intensely local, Web-first news reports. Notably, Gannett Co. has pushed the mojo concept at its Fort Myers News-Press, where the term apparently came into use. Mojos there contribute continously to microsites that are devoted to coverage of suburban communities.
More reading:
Posted at 2:31 PM December 17, 2007