Social Media Jargon Buster
Above the fold
The area of a website visible on screen without the need to scroll down. NB The 'fold' will be in a slightly different place on different screens at different resolutions.
AdSense
Bloggers and website owners make money by integrating Google's AdWords ads on their site. AdSense automatically matches ads to the site content and pays money each time someone clicks.
AdWords
A pay-per-click ad service for creating adverts aligned to specific search terms or keywords. As an advertiser, you can decide how much you want to pay and where your ad appears, e.g. on Google search pages.
Affiliate Marketing
The system where website owners are rewarded for bringing visitors to a retailer's site. Affiliates receive a fee for leads and sales. If you have good traffic; potentially a nice little earner.
Aggregation
The process of collecting content (news headlines, blogs, podcasts, vlogs) from other sites and placing them in one place for easy viewing - usually on an aggregator's website or delivered to a newsreader on the desktop.
Aggregator sites like Bloglines, newsgator and netvibes work by collecting and grouping articles based on general interest or personal preferences.
Google News uses algorithms which carry out contextual analysis to group similar stories together. Clever stuff.
Aggregator
An aggregator (a.k.a. feedreader, newsreader) is the bit of software which amasses syndicated content and presents it via RSS to your computer.
AJAX
The preferred cleaning fluid for web developers. Or, a web development technique used for creating interactive web apps that retrieve data from the server asynchronously without interfering with the display of the existing page. It's one or the other. You decide.
Alerts
A free web snooping and tracking tool. Search for a particular topic, news story, competitor, celeb or event and someone like Google Alerts will email you with links to the latest info.
Alexa
A useful site to find out how much traffic is going where. The lower the Alexa ranking, the more popular the site.
A-list
The blogging elite. Perez Hilton is one of the most famous, if you're into celebrity tittle-tattle and The Huffington Post has a huge following for political scandal in the US. Sometimes called 'Bloglebrities' but that's getting silly.
Anchor Text
The clickable text in a hyperlink that gives visitors or search engines important information on what the page being linked to is about. Use relevant keywords to help your SEO.
API
Application Programming Interface. None the wiser? In short, it's code that makes an exchange of data possible. Facebook, Google Maps and iphone have all released their APIs to enable third party developers to produce sexy bolt-ons, bells and whistles; various gadgets, gizmos and widgets.
Astroturfing
Not a practise performed by open-minded adults in golf driving ranges (as far as we know), Astroturfing is trying to cheat the online community by creating a fake grassroots 'buzz' around a product, service or event. Some companies will get their people to pretend to be advocates or pay a blogger to say nice things but they should beware, most communities will see straight through you and the backlash can be destructive!
Audiocast
A broad term for all audio content broadcast over the internet. An MP3 file, a podcast, streaming audio are all examples. See Audioboo, a kind of Twitter with sounds instead of text.
