For years I’ve been helping my friends and family understand some of the jargon that goes along with being on the web. Now that the web is commonplace, the number of questions I get has increased. Thankfully, there are many resources out there to help people get some great answers now. For a long time, the web lingo has dissuaded people from using the technologies that we geeks come up with. That time is coming to a close thanks to a few friends of mine – CommonCraft founders Lee and Sashi LeFever.
The series they’ve been doing for quite some time now is one I refer to often. It’s essentially called the “Plain English” series in my book. They do the tough job of taking difficult to understand technological words, concepts, and software and break it down into … well, plain English – a language that normal human beings (well, normal for those of us who speak English already) understand.
For starters, let’s take the idea of a Wiki. Where the heck did that word come from? Wiki. Say it a few times and instead of being frustrated, I guarantee you’ll start to laugh at yourself.
But what is a wiki anyway?
This is the perfect example of where Lee and Sashi’s Plain English series comes into play. They’ve created a video for you to explain this very thing. I’m simply going to include it here, but I highly suggest that you go and visit their site (CommonCraft.com) to get more information on other things that you can learn about in plain English besides wikis.
The past year has been full of social media being the first to break the news. Even prior to this year I was hearing of earthquakes and good news reports from citizen journalists long before the traditional journalists showed up on the scene.
The Iran elections have changed the face of media and government control [...]
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And without much ado, I [...]
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Hi everyone,
Please listen for a second. I’ll try to keep this short, but if you don’t want to read anymore, please do me this one favor.
Click this link, register, and vote for our team and our idea:
http://ideablob.com/ideas/3344-Disaster-Emergency-Info-Now-
Now, for those of you who are a little hesitant, here’s why I want you to click, register and [...]
The image above, which looks like a broken Death Star, is actually a visual representation of my Social Graph (at least on Facebook).
Rather than explain what a Social Graph is, I’ll just tell you this. First, there’s a new kind of geek in the world now. I’ll call them the Social Geeks™. [...]
The image to the left was created using Google Maps on Sunday, May 4th 2008. Although this map is static, it’s a replica of the map shown on the right sidebar of our Traveling Europe blog. This post will explain how I use my iPhone, a new service called BrightKite, and a [...]
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