Alison Fish: Jargon Glossary

Aha! Radio-Weblog-Tech Term of the Week

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 21:04:10 GMT

Actually, there are two terms I discovered today. One is bookmarklet. I assumed that bookmarklets were entries added to the Radio desktop application under menu item "Bookmarks".

The other is rss auto-discovery. I thought that this term described some spider that crawled the web to find rss feeds that matched the user's interests.

Wrong and wrong.

I just subscribed to Jon Udell's rss category (the category is 'rss', get it?) Jon mentions using diveintomark's rss autodiscovery technique. Mark's instructions were to drag this link into the web browser's link toolbar, which I didn't know I had. Well I found it, I dragged said link onto (into) the toolbar and it became a bookmarklet.

So bookmarklet is not a Radio Userland term, it is a web browser (well, an IE and Netscape browser) term. It is "a tiny program (a JavaScript application) contained in a bookmark (the URL is a "javascript:" URL) which can be saved and used the same way you use normal bookmarks" according to bookmarklet.com.

Now rss auto-discovery, it turns out, has nothing to do with spiders. While the orange and white xml button allows users to find your rss address. The coffee cup button goes a step further by allowing Radio users to add a subscription in one click. Well, the rss auto-discovery bookmarklet takes it a step further still: instead of scrolling up and down someone's web page to find their rss buttons, one can simply click their own bookmarklet on their own link toolbar of their own browser.

Someday in the near future I will edit this post so it makes more sense. Reading this made the concept click for me.

screed, grok, gonzo, meme

Sun, 25 Aug 2002 03:03:45 GMT

Radio Free Blogistan looks like a good resource for jargon term origination:

"...What most surprised me was his attribution of longstanding jargon (such as "grrl") to the blogosphere. Had he never heard of riotgrrls? Similarly, he writes in his facetious list of advice, be sure to use:
screed, grok, gonzo, meme, and other bloggerisms
OK, now. "Screed" is a real word. He should look it up. "Grok" goes back to Heinlein and has been faux-hip ("hep") for years, decades. Gonzo is a '50s/'60s era play on "real gone," the title of a movie, piano genius James Carroll Booker III's nickname, and the sobriquet for a type of journalism practiced by folks like Hunter S. Thompson in the 1960s and '70s. I believe there's a gonzo porn genre as well. Lastly, "meme" may be a popular concept in Blogistan but its hardly a bloggerism. I recommend that Dvorak read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and then get back to us."
[Radio Free Blogistan]

Sat, 24 Aug 2002 20:19:35 GMT

Scott Johnson has a good glossary of Radio Terms.

macro

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 20:27:57 GMT

"insertDefinition"

scraping

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 20:25:31 GMT

insert definition here:

grok

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 20:18:10 GMT

(Note to self - saw something about handling form-submitted data somewhere in Radio Docs.)

LOL

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 19:09:06 GMT

laugh out loud

has been misunderstood as: little old lady [My Mom]

First Entry in Jargon Glossary Category : ROTFL

Tue, 13 Aug 2002 19:07:39 GMT

rolling on the floor laughing. [Ken Dow]