Novice Narcosis: Online lingo, part three
by Robert Morris, Special to AdBanter.com
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As the Internet continues to grow and grow, millions of new people are being exposed to what's paying for all of this dot com hysteria -- Online Advertising. As the industry continues to develop, so does the terminology.
And with all of the new advertising executives switching over from traditional mediums to the online variety, it only makes sense to try and educate (or refresh, depending on your experience level) everyone on the lingo that has enveloped into an almost counter-culture in the advertising world.
So in our third installment of Novice Narcosis (L-R), we'll review some of the more common language that is specific to the online world.
LAN - Local Area Network. A group of connected computers in a limited area - an office or a certain floor of an office building. Almost all LANs are connected to the Internet.
Leased Line - A dedicated phone line used exclusively to link a moderate-sized local network to an Internet Service Provider. Also referred to as a T-1, T-3 or DSL line.
Link - An electronic connection between two Web sites (also called a hot link or hyperlink).
Mailing List - A system, often used with electronic discussion groups, that allows users to send email to one address, whereupon their message is copied and sent to all other subscribers to the mail list. If you belong to the mailing list, you receive every message posted to that list.
MIME - Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. A standard for attaching and encoding non-text (graphics, spreadsheets, sound files, et al.) files to regular email.
Mosaic - The first World Wide Web browser used with Macintosh, Windows and UNIX that could use the same interface. First developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
MUD - Multi-User Dungeon. Modeled on the original Dungeons and Dragons game, it is a group of role-playing games that have been used as conferencing and educational tools. A feature of MUDs is that users can create things that stay after they leave and which other users can interact with in their absence, thus allowing a world to be built gradually and collectively.
Netiquette - The etiquette of the Internet.
Network - Any time two or more computers are connected together so they can share resources, they are a network. Connect two or more networks together and you have an Internet.
Node - Any single computer connected to a network.
Page - All Web sites are a collection of electronic "pages." Each Web page is a document formatted in HTML that contains text, images or media objects.
Page views - The number of times a user requests a page that may contain a particular ad, which is indicative of the number of times an ad was potentially seen. Page views often overstate ad views because some users turn off graphics to improve browsing time.
Portal - Usually used as a marketing term to describe a Web site that is a catalog of sites, a search engine, or both. A portal site usually offers email and other free services to entice people to use that site as their main "point of entry" to the Web.
Real Audio - A software application that let's you hear sound (as it occurs) over the Web. Software can usually be downloaded for free from any number of places on the Internet.
Next time, we'll finish the series with S-Z.
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