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.

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.