Categories are a way of organising the content of your blog (or website for that matter) so your visitor can read all the posts on a particular topic in one place. 'Digi-filing' you could say. We just made that up. ED: I thought we were supposed to be demystifying here, not adding fuel to the fire...
A channel describes the source and detail of a podcast, so will have information about the author, the web address where the audio file/podcast is residing and the language spoken.
A conversation with people in a chat room in real time is known as 'chat'. Now, Google 'Chat' and it will tell you it stands for 'Conversational Hypertext Access Technology'. Rarely has the phrase 'over-egging the pudding' been more apposite.
A digital destination where people swap opinions via online conversations. Like Starbucks, then, but without the double-decaff-skinny-wet-mocchaccinos.
Chicklets are the small, often orange buttons, which are links to web feeds such as RSS and Atom. Now we've mentioned it, you'll notice them everywhere. It's like buying a different make of car. Never noticed them before, now they're everywhere...
A click-through is when a website visitor clicks on a hyperlink or a web advertisement, such as a banner ad, and is then taken through to the advertiser's website. Not to be confused with 'drive-through' - a facility for lazy people who like take-aways.
An attempt to distort search engine rankings. A dangerous game akin to smoking in the toilets: it can get you thrown out.
Content Management System. The 'back-end' access to a website where an administrator and get in and amend the content.
Also known as 'groupware', this allows different people to work together over the internet on the same documents or projects, often in real time.
Defined by George Pór (brainy Belgian bloke) as 'the capacity of a human community to evolve toward higher thought'. Not to be confused with 'the Wisdom of Crowds', where individual preferences and decisions may aggregate to produce better results without people consciously collaborating.
A comment is when a visitor visits a blog or forum, reads a post and writes something in response; a kind of digital 'tuppence-worth', if you will.
Comment spam, link spam or blog spam refers to a comment left on a blog that is completely unrelated to the post and often contains a link to another site - which then gets boosted in the search engine rankings. It's unethical. It's wrong. Don't do it.
Content = stuff.; all the stuff you find on the web from words to photos, and from videos to animations. The general rule dictates that content is king; the more good content you have, the better your site.
A trend whereby the same technologies are available across different formats and platforms. So you can now browse the web on your TV and mobile; watch TV on your PC; and take photos on your mobile. If you'd been asleep for 20 years, you wouldn't believe it possible. (If this is you, they'll also try to tell you there's an African-American in the White House too).
The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who visit your site and take the desired action e.g signing-up for a newsletter, buying a product or downloading a brochure.
A cookie is a text file that holds information about your visit to a website, e.g a user name or password. Cookies are stored on your hard drive, harmless and 100% fat-free.
Crawlers, robots or spiders work for search engines and crawl the web gathering information on new web pages, updating old pages and deleting dead pages. Kerb-crawlers are entirely different.
A blog created specifically to handle a PR meltdown. It means you can respond quickly, squash rumours and give your side of the story.
This is when a company harnesses the skills and enthusiasm of those outside the business, volunteers - to create content, do research and solve problems, free of charge. Exploits the 'social' bit of 'social media'.