The term “podcast” is a mixture of the words “pod”, roughly referring to Apple’s popular “iPod” and “broadcasting”. Simply put, a podcast is a media file, like audio or video that’s transmitted over the Internet through an RSS feed. Just like you can subscribe to an RSS feed for a blog and get updates about a web site, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of a podcast and get audio and video updates. While the most popular types of files that are sent are usually audio and video files, you can also send PDF files, graphics, or really any other type of file.

Now just because the term refers to Apple’s iPod, that doesn’t mean that you need an iPod to subscribe to and receive the contents of a podcast. Any computer that has an internet connection and some kind of media player like QuickTime, iTunes, or Windows Media Player can play the contents of a podcast. If you have a portable MP3 player, you can transfer your podcasts on to it and play them wherever you want. If you want to subscribe to a podcast, you’ll need something similar to an RSS feed reader called a podcatcher. iPodder is a popular podcatcher and iTunes also has the ability not play podcasts but to subscribe to them as well.

So why are podcasts so nifty? Well, because people can subscribe to podcasts and get new podcasts automatically without visiting a web site, it’s perfect for creating regular music and talk shows with multiple episodes. Anyone with a computer, an internet connection, and a microphone can create their own podcast. There are thousands of podcasts available from music shows, talk shows, educational shows, instructional videos, just about any topic you can think of. While most people creating podcasts are regular folks, big media organizations like National Public Radio and CNN are also launching their own podcasts.

Interested in checking out a podcast? There are a number of podcast directories available on the internet, the most popular include, Podcast Alley, iPodder.org, and the iTunes Music store also has section on podcasts.

I’m not exactly sure that this term truly qualifies as a Geeky term as lately it seems like blogs are going mainstream…but I just realized that I had to explain to my hubby exactly what I was doing while I’m writing my blog posts so….

The word “blog” is actually a short way of saying “web log” or “weblog”…and basically a blog is a web site that’s written like an online journal, with time stamped and dated entries in reverse chronological order…or listed from the newest entry to the oldest. If you’re reading this right now..guess what…you’re reading a blog.

The beginning of the very first blogs began waaay back in 1994, when groups of people created online diaries in order to chronicle the their daily goings ons. This group of people who called themselves diarists created a community called Open Pages. Eventually these personal diaries evolved from just commenting on personal events to news, politics, technology. Blogs and blogging gained a boost as a mainstream phenomenon with the popularity of political and news blogs. Even the traditional new media is taking notice of blogs as a news source and are even creating blogs of their own. Now with the availability of both free and paid blogging tools like Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, or Wordpress, it’s easier than ever to start your own blog about any topic you can imagine. With the latest blogging software you don’t need to know HTML or even to have a web site…just grab an account and you’re off to the blogging races!

So how are blogs different from regular old web sites? Other than the journaling format, there are some other differences. Blog software not only makes it easy to make regular entries, but it also makes it easier for blogs to link to other blogs and it’s easy for regular visitors to start conversations on blogs, and therein lays the power of blogging. Instead of one lone blogger tapping away at a solitary blog, bloggers link to other bloggers through a system of tools called permalinks, trackbacks, and blogrolls. If one blogger sees an entry on another blog that he or she finds interesting, they can link to that entry on their own blog through a permalink or trackback, creating a network of interlinked blogs. Visitors to a blog can make comments about a particular entry and even sustain conversations through these comments.

And blogging is not just confined to words…there are also different flavors of blogs including:

• Photolog- blogging with photos
• Vlog- blogging with videos
• Moblog- blogging using a mobile device like a cell phone

More interested in reading blogs than creating one of your own? Well, you’re certainly welcome to keep reading this one! But if you’re still hungry for more, blog directories like Technorati, Feedster, and Blogdigger will find one for every interest imaginable. With over 57 million blogs (and counting) to choose from…how can they not?

If you’ve ever been to Hawaii, you might have actually seen this word before since in the Hawaiian language, “wiki wiki” actually means “fast”. But in the Internet world, it describes a piece of software that allows you and anyone else to change a web page…fast!

Wiki’s are web sites that allow anyone that visits to add, change, or delete content. For example, if this web site was a wiki, you can come and change this post into almost anything you like…you could change the topic, add links to other sites, add photos, videos…anything. And then someone else could come along and add something else to this post or make changes to your changes. And then someone else could come and delete the post entirely! Talk about power! Can you get anymore Web 2.0 than that?

Nice, you might be saying, but what’s a wiki good for if everyone can change it? It’ll be chaos! Well, not necessarily. Wikis are good for storing knowledge that might be evolving and changing and for allowing a group of knowledgeable people to make updates quickly. And wiki software does allow you to set different levels of permissions. So you can block off certain pages from being changed, block off certain people from changing things, and be notified when there are changes made.

The first known web site that was set up as a wiki was WikiWikiWeb set up by programmer Ward Cunningham. This site focused on programming and Ward Cunningham wanted to make this web site easy for the people that used it make quick edits. But the most well known wiki is of course the famous Wikipedia…the online encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to…which is actually where I found the biography of Ward Cunningham…the guy who helped make Wikipedia possible.

?Update The word “wiki” is landed a spot in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Today’s term is a part of a series that focuses on Web 2.0 related terms

The term “social media” describes how people use the Internet and different Internet technologies in order to share their content, opinions, and experiences with others on the Internet.

Now, using the web in order to connect with other people isn’t new. We’ve been using email, chat, and forums for years. What makes social media interesting is that the technology on the web now allows people to contribute their own content on the web…it allows people to share not only their own content, but the content of others with their friends and family…and they can also share their opinions and thoughts about that content. And instead of connecting with others just to talk to one another, people are connecting with in order to control and shape the Internet.

What kind of content are talking about? Pretty much anything and everything. You can upload and share your photos of Hawaii on Flickr and Zoto, and critique and share the photos of other shutterbugs. You can submit that video of you lip syncing to at Britney Spears song (minus hair cut) YouTube or Dailymotion and laugh at and email the videos contributed by other wannabe pop stars to your friends. You can use del.icio.us and StumbleUpon to store the links to your favorite sites and poke through the bookmarks of other people to find new sites. If your a Mister or Mrs. Smartypants, you would enjoy Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia where you can add your own “encyclopedia” entries and correct factual errors on others. And we mustn’t forget the infamous MySpace…a place where you can create your own “space” to gather friends and to create a network of people like you.

In a nutshell, social media is all about sharing…photos, videos, links, knowledge, opinions, news, games…anything you can think of.

Do you have Web 2.0?

Actually, Web 2.0 really is more of a way of describing how people using the web nowadays instead of any one specific “thing” or “program” or piece of software. The term “Web 2.0″ was dreamed up by the folks at O’Reilly Media and they defined “Web 2.0″ as “second generation of web-based services“. Think blogs, think content sharing sites like Flickr for sharing photos, or YouTube for sharing videos or del.icio.us for sharing links to other sites. If you were here on the web in the early days of the Internet, you’ll remember that is was mostly static pages of information. Someone put a web site up….you would visit the page, read the information, and usually, that was the end of it.

Not so in the Web 2.0 world. If in the “Web 1.0″ world you had a web page authored by one person, in the “Web 2.0″ world you have blog written by several people. Visitors no longer just read and leave, but they also add their own comments, they may add your blog to their list of RSS feeds in their feed readers, or they may have a blog of their own and they link to your blog. You’ll have people linking to your web page and voting on how useful it is. You have people posting photos of their trip to Hawaii on the web and other people posting comments about the pictures and linking to those pictures from their blog or from their web site.

The old Web was all about making isolated web sites of information available to the world. “Web 2.0″ is all about people taking information and sharing it, adding to it, and sometimes completely changing it. While Web 1.0 was more about information, Web 2.0 is more about people and human connections.

RSS is one of those fun Internet acronyms that stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. RSS is an XML format that allows you to syndicate news and content on your web site. Think of it this way…you know how you use your car radio to pick up music and news from radio stations? The radio stations broadcast their music on radio waves on a specific channel, you pick up the radio station on your car radio by dialing to that channel and voila…you get your news and music from that radio station. RSS feeds are similar in that fashion only instead of delivering music and news over the airwaves, RSS feeds delivers content over the Internet. Web sites act as radio stations using RSS feeds to “broadcast” their content over the Internet and you can use software programs called “feed readers” to “dial in” on a web site’s RSS feed. To tune into a web site’s RSS feed, you simply need to add the address to a particular site’s RSS feed to your RSS reader. Addresses to RSS feeds can look just like a web address…for example the RSS feed address for The Crafted Webmaster is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheCraftedWebmaster

Noticed that little orange icon next the link? That icon indicates that the following link is an RSS feed. Feed addresses can also end with a .xml or a .rss.

So why is RSS useful? If you read blogs or visit news sites, you’ll have to go to that site everyday to read new articles and news….right? Not if the site has an RSS feed! Simply add that feed to your RSS feed reader and the updates come to you. No more visiting the site every day to see what’s new. Added bonus…subscribing to a feed is completely anonymous…unlike subscribing to an email newsletter, you don’t have to provide an email address, your name or any kind of information to subscribe to a feed. Tired of reading a particular feed? Delete it from your feed reader…no muss, no fuss.

Still a bit shaky? Watch the video below!