Definitions |
Resources | Trends & Statistics | Definitions | Links | Downloads |
| Broadband Broadband Internet access is high-speed Internet access as opposed to dial up internet access over a dial up modem. Dial-up modems are generally only capable of a maximum bitrate of 56 kbit/s (kilobits per second) and require the full use of a telephone line—whereas broadband technologies supply at least double this speed and generally without disrupting telephone use. Speeds are defined in terms of maximum download because several common consumer broadband technologies such as ADSL are "asymmetric"—supporting much slower maximum upload speeds than download. Examples of Broadband:
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| SPAM E-mail spam, also known as "bulk e-mail" or "junk e-mail," is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. "UCE" refers specifically to "unsolicited commercial e-mail." Email spam slowly but exponentially grew for several decades to several billion messages a day. Spam has frustrated, confused, and annoyed e-mail users. Laws against spam have been sporadically implemented, with some being opt-out and others requiring opt in email. The total volume of spam (over 100 billion emails per day as of April 2008) has levelled off slightly in recent years, and is no longer growing exponentially. The amount received by most email users has decreased, mostly because of better filtering. E-mail addresses are collected from chatrooms, websites, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. |
| Email Electronic mail (email) is a store-and-forward method of writing, sending, receiving and saving messages over electronic communication systems. The term "e-mail" applies to the Internet e-mail system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, to network systems based on other protocols and to various mainframe, minicomputer, or internet by a particular systems vendor, or on the same protocols used on public networks. E-mail is often used to deliver bulk unsolicited messages, or "spam", but filter programs exist which can automatically block, quarantine or delete some or most of these, depending on the situation. |
| Operating System An operating system (“OS”) is the software component of a computer system that is responsible for the management and co-ordination of activities and the sharing of the resources of the computer. The operating system acts as a host for applications that are run on the machine. As a host, one of the purposes of an operating system is to handle the details of the operation of the hardware. This relieves application programs from having to manage these details and makes it easier to write applications. Almost all computers, including handheld computers, desktop computers, supercomputers, and even video game consoles, use an operating system of some type. Examples of Operating Systems:
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| Web Browser A web browser is a software application which enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music, games and other information. Text and images on a website can contain hyperlinks to other webpages at the same or different website. Web browsers allow a user to quickly and easily access information provided on many Web pages at many websites by traversing these links. Web browsers format HTML information for display, so the appearance of a webpage may differ between different browsers. Examples of Web Browsers:
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| Data Centre A data centre is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g. air conditioning, fire suppression) and security devices. |
| VoIP Voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) is a protocol optimised for the transmission of voice through the Internet. VoIP-to-VoIP phone calls are generally free, while VoIP calls connecting to public switched telephone networks (VoIP-to-PSTN) may have a cost that to the VoIP user. |
| ISP (Internet Service Provider) An Internet service provider (ISP) is a company who offers their customers access to the Internet. ISP's may provide Internet e-mail accounts to users which allow them to communicate with one another by sending and receiving electronic messages through their ISPs' servers. |
| Open Source Software Open source software (OSS) began as a marketing campaign for free software. OSS can be defined as computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that meets the Open Source Definition. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Examples of OSS:
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| Sponsored (Paid) Search Results These are the related advertisements paid for by organisations to achieve the top spots in a search engine. |
| Organic Search Results These are the natural results that search engines list as a result of their rankings. |
| SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). SEM methods can include either SEO or purchasing sponsored listings on search engines. |
| SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Search engine optimisation (SEO also search optimisation) is the process of editing and organising the content on a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines and importantly ensuring that external links to the site are correctly titled and in abundance. This is done with the aim of achieving a higher organic search listing and thus increasing the volume of targeted traffic from search engines. SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimising a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords. Sometimes a site's structure must be altered too. Because of this it is always better to incorporate Search Engine Optimisation when a website is being developed than to try and apply it later. The term “search engine friendly” refers to a website that has been search optimised. |
| CMS (Content Management System) A content management system (CMS) is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, and publish content on a website. A CMS allows users in an organisation to update certain areas of that site depending on their assigned permission levels. |
| E-Marketing E-marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses email as a means of communicating messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. The term is usually used to refer to:
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| AJAX Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a group of interrelated web development techniques used for creating interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behaviour of the existing page. AJAX applications are seen as a “Web 2.0” trend in website design. |
| XML The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. It is classified as an extensible language because it allows its users to define their own elements. Its primary purpose is to help information systems share structured data, particularly via the Internet, and it is used both to encode documents and to serialise data. |
| RSS RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video. An RSS document ("feed") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favoured 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. The user subscribes to a feed and the RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for updates and downloads anything new that it finds. |
| Internet Forum (Message Board) An Internet forum, or message board, is a bulletin board system in the form of a discussion site. From a technological stand point, forums or boards are web applications managing user-generated content. Forums allow anonymous visitors to view the contents and consist of a group of contributors who've registered into the system, becoming known as members. The members submit topics for discussion (known as threads) and communicate with each other using publicly visible messages (referred to as posts) or private messaging. People participating in an internet forum will usually build bonds with each other and interest groups will easily form around a topic's discussion and subjects dealt within the forum |
| Web 2.0 Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and its hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis and blogs. |
| Flash Adobe Flash (previously Shockwave Flash and Macromedia Flash) is a set of multimedia software created by Macromedia and currently developed and distributed by Adobe Systems. Since its introduction in 1996, Flash has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, and various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications. Flash can manipulate vector and raster graphics and supports bi-directional streaming of audio and video. It contains a scripting language called ActionScript. Files in the SWF format, ("ShockWave Flash" movies) usually have a .swf file extension and may be an object of a web page. Flash Video (FLV) files have a .flv file extension and are either used from within .swf files or played through a flv aware player, such as VLC, or QuickTime and Windows Media Player with external codecs added. |
| Internet Domain Names Internet domain names are used in a variety of contexts for identification, reference, and access to Internet resources. They can appear as components of a website's Uniform Resource Locator (URL), e.g. www.antevo.com.au or electronic mail (e-mail) addresses after the '@' separator from the user's name. Example of a domain name:
Examples of domain name extensions:
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| HTTP vs HTTPS HTTP (hyper text transfer protocol) is what presents data to you in the format of a website. It does not care how the data is sent from point A to B. This is why it is the fastest method to deliver a website to a user. HTTPS does the same function as HTTP although it can differentiate one sender and receiver to another. it does this using SSL to send the data from point A to point B. This is why it is more secure than HTTP. The data that you requested is only sent to you, and it is also encrypted along the way. |
| Encryption Encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing “a key”. The result of the process is encrypted information. Once the encrypted information is received at the other end is is then decrypted back into readable information. Encryption has long been used by militaries and governments to facilitate secret communication. Encryption is now used in protecting information within most computers, networks (e.g. the Internet, e-commerce), mobile telephones, wireless microphones, Bluetooth devices and bank automatic teller machines. |
| SSL Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide secure communications on the Internet for such things as web browsing, e-mail, Internet faxing, instant messaging and other data transfers. |
| Video on the Web With the spread of broadband Internet access, video clips have become very popular online. To speed up loading times they are often displayed as a flash video file rather than an MPEG or AVI file. By mid 2006 there were tens of millions of video clips available online, with new websites springing up focusing entirely on offering free video clip to users and many established and corporate sites adding video clip content to their websites. |
| QR Code A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are common in Japan where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes. |
| Search Engine A search engine is designed to search for information on the Internet. Information may consist of web pages, images and other types of files (e.g. PDF's). Some search engines also mine data available in newsbooks, databases, or open directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input. |
| eCommerce Electronic commerce, (commonly known as eCommerce), consists of the buying and selling of products or services over the Internet. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. |
| Social Network Service A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Social network services provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services. Examples of Social Network Services:
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| Blog A blog ("web log") is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, webpages, and other media related to its topic. Readers also have the ability to leave comments on blog entries. |
| Instant Messaging (IM) Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via computers connected over a network such as the Internet.
Examples of IM:
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| Wiki A wiki is a collection of pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified (markup) language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide Intranets and Knowledge Management Systems. An exmaple of a very large wiki is: Wikipedia - the online encylopedia |