As social networks spread and become more intricately woven, words like “meme” (rhymes with “dream”) are used frequently, in particular “Internet meme.”

Internet meme, n. an idea or catchphrase that spreads quickly from person to person online.

Examples of Internet memes are LOLcats or Twitter hashtags like #charitytuesday. Wired magazine features Meme Alerts, have a look at some of the ones they’ve discovered.

Pepole make studies of memes. You can read more from this helpful article in Straight Dope and The Lifecycle of Memes.

Crawlability: n. a measure of the ease with which a website may be scanned by a search engine robot.

This is one bit of jargon worth learning. It has a big impact on a site’s search engine rankings. Three things you can do to improve your site’s crawlability:

1. Add a hierarchical sitemap
2. Use descriptive URLs everywhere (i.e., pages should called about-us.html or driving_directions.html. Or better yet, get a CMS to do the hard work for you.)
3. Make sure titles and headings reflect the site’s most important elements

I wish the acronym “RSS” had never been invented. It’s confusing, hard to describe and something everyone wants to understand. I much prefer the term “news feed” for this technology that helps you get blog and podcast updates on your computer.

Nevertheless, I was glad to see that Unclutterer wrote up a handy primer on the term. It’s still a bit jargon (they use the term “content” a little too freely. Think of “content” as the stuff on your website, such as articles and listings), but still helpful.

Read and enjoy: RSS feeds: A primer

Now, sign up for the RSS feeds on the Friendly Web Tools blog.

Recently, someone from a UK firm putting together a glossary of social media jargon asked me to contribute. The world of social media jargon is immense, but I realized I’ve been hearing the word “ping” in a sense that didn’t really make sense to me.

Ping, v. This is something you send to a computer for an automated response. I’ve heard it (erroneously) as a synonym for “e-mail” or “instant message.”

You can look at more social media jargon from their glossary.

I like to think I'm fluent in English, being born and raised in America and all. But sometimes I feel like I'm learning a new language: technospeak. Every industry is rich with its own jargon, but because so many people use the Internet, the technology industry's jargon frustratingly works its way into common speak (remember when we all laughed about the word "blog"?). You don't need to know what all this terminology means (like undercooked spaghetti not all of it will stick), but here are what I consider the top five most important tech terms that are worth learning.

1. SEO (search engine optimization): “… the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via … search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it 'ranks,' the more searchers will visit that site." From Wikipedia. See blog postings on SEO.
2. Open source: “… a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process.” From the Open Source Initiative. Software code that is created under open source guidelines (such as Drupal – our CMS of choice) is open to anybody to use without licensing restrictions.
3. RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary, depending on who you ask): “… a format used to publish frequently updated works - such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video. An RSS document (which is called a 'feed', 'web feed', or 'channel') includes full or summarized text … [that] benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an 'RSS reader', 'feed reader', or 'aggregator', which can be web-based or desktop-based.” From Wikipedia. Here's the Friendly Web Tools Blog RSS feed and instructions on how to use it.
4. Microblogging: “… the practice of sending brief posts to a personal blog on a Web site, such as Twitter or Jaiku. Microposts can be made public on a Web site and/or distributed to a private group of subscribers. Subscribers can read posts online or request that updates be delivered in real time to their desktop as an instant message or sent to a mobile device as an SMS text message.” From SearchMobileComputing.com. Follow Talance on Twitter.
5. Social network fatigue: “The ennui induced by persistent solicitations to join new social networks. It is especially acute in those who are already members of more MySpaces than they can remember." From Wired.

The world of technology is hard enough to keep up with - never mind all the new vocabulary that continually arises. That’s why we decided to launch an occasional new feature, the Friendly Web Tools Blog Word Watch. We’ll keep our ears open for new words and define them here so you can see what’s new on the scene - and more importantly - what it means.

Today: tweetup, n. A spontaneous meeting among connections who follow each other on the microblogging service Twitter. Friends usually meet, but more often strangers are participating in these ad hoc meetings too.

As in: “Impromptu Tweetup Tonight @ Apple Bar: 17 Waverly Place, NYC 6:30-8pm. Hope you can make it!” (source)

Wondering what Twitter is? Take a look at blog entries I’ve tagged with the word Twitter.