This glossary covers Web 2.0 terminology and is an ongoing project. It is not intended to be exhaustive and we would appreciate feedback and any suggestions for additions from our readers.

AJAX

AJAX is a web development technique that makes websites a pleasure to use. To contribute to an AJAX powered website, you no longer have to submit content and wait for a whole new page to load up. This is particularly exciting for Africans accustomed to (for example) waiting minutes on end for their webmail to load up or who frequently see a white screen instead of a confirmation message that the email they have been working on for the past thirty minutes has been delivered successfully.

Badge

Badges (or banners) are a terrific, widely used tool on blogs and websites. When something particularly notable or outrageous happens that affects you, like Hurricane Katrina or the arrest of a blogger, you can show your affiliation and solidarity by placing a Badge directly on your own blog or website. Badges are also often used to promote particular human rights campaigns, such as "I blog for human rights" at Human Rights Watch and "Stop Violence against Women" at Amnesty International. Badges, as exemplified by Global Voices, also serve to simply bring together a community of bloggers with shared concerns.

Blog

According to Wikipedia, "A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order."

If you ever wondered "what's so special about blogging, anyway?" then you will find the answer by taking a closer look at the various links associated with specific blog postings. Whether you have your own blog or not, you can use these links to interact with and participate in blogs in completely new ways. Most simply, you can leave comments to express support or to argue with someone's assertions. You can also add it to a shared bookmarks site such as del.icio.us or digg.com for later reference or to show others you find it interesting. You can see who else is blogging about a blog using a feature called trackbacks or pingbacks. Permalinks are permanent links to blog entries that will not change - so you can share them with others with the assurance that they will see the plog entry the same way you did. Permalinks and trackbacks are particularly useful together since, if you have your own blog, you can post a comment on your blog about a particular blog and start a conversation between your two blogs.

Blogosphere

Blogroll

Blog Aggregator

Buzz

Content

Creative Commons

Let other people use your content without asking by labelling it with a free, open-source like license. Creative Commons has done the legwork for you by providing both human readable and legally binding licenses that you can use, and badges that you can use to link to them from your website. According to the Creative Commons Web site, "Offering your work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any member of the public but only on certain conditions." This is a powerful Web 2.0 strategy for releasing the benefits of your creative works to the world while retaining your copyright.

Crowdsourcing

Folksonomies, not Taxonomies

It is now possible to organize photos, blogs, useful links, and any kind of content using multiple keywords, commonly referred to as "Folksonomy" Tags and Tag Clouds. Folksonomies differ from traditional taxonomies because they include keywords that are made up by the ordinary folks (people) using the website. This might give a librarian a heart attack because it means dozens of different terms might be used for organizing the exact same content, but it also makes the organization of the content more user-driven and dynamic.

Open API and RSS

Combine content and features from multiple websites to create a new, interesting and maybe revolutionary way of looking at content. Made possible largely through new standards in Really Simple Syndication (RSS) of blogs and any other kind of website content and "Open" Application Programmer's Interfaces (API) for Web 2.0 sites. Prominent examples include Google Map and Flickr.

Thanks to the Flickr API, anyone with a blog or website can add an attractive photo slideshow to the sidebar. YouTube also provides similar functionality to allow people to display YouTube videos directly in their own blogs. A simpler example is RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds, which enable anyone to grab the latest headlines from a Web 2.0 website and display them attractively in a newsreader or on their own website. RSS feeds are the bread and butter of many Web 2.0 websites like Technorati and Global Voices that add value to blogs by delivering RSS Feeds to people in innovative and useful new ways.

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Web 2.0 websites place a particularly strong emphasis on usability of web interfaces, meaning that they are intuitive and easy to use. It is so important that "Usability expert" is a new job description.

Web 2.0

The term itself originates from an years-long discourse among techies about the evolution of Internet technology (Web 2.0 as a step up from Web 1.0). In fact the underlying technology driving the Internet and web browsing is nothing new. The purpose of the web was always to facilitate the sharing of information, and the fundamental standards and principles established for this decades ago still stand. But today Web 2.0 has come to represent a growing perception and excitement among investors, enthusiasts and practitioners that the promise of the Internet as a tool for collaboration and information sharing is now finally being delivered.