The Plan: Internet Jargon Rundown
Two things happened to me yesterday that got me thinking. First, in my Internet Journalism class, my professor told us each to spend the next week collecting Web 2.0 -ish buzzwords so that we could assemble for ourselves an in-class Internet Buzz Lexicon. Second, one of my coworkers teased a video feature for our Web site as a ‘video podcast’, prompting me to start drafting a presentation for early next week on Internet lexicon for the new newsroom.
This relates to a point I’ve been seeing in the blogs and that I see again today over at two of my faves as Pat Thornton expounds on a post by Mindy McAdams. I find myself wishing that my fellow aspiring journos would catch my passion for Web technologies like the headcold we were passing around the newsroom a couple of weeks back, but if that isn’t going to happen, I find myself wondering how you just give a bulleted list of terms and explain them in alphabetical order? Can you really understand the difference between a podcast - even a video podcast - and an embedded video? Should I start the explanation of that difference by listing and describing a bunch of other technologies they won’t understand if they don’t use them - RSS, XML, FLV, etc.?
I come from the school of thought that teaches that understanding these things well enough to use them, plan them and talk about them effectively, you have to do two things: you have to understand how they fit together, how they work instead of what they are, and you have to try them a few times.
To that end, I’m going to both shoot for some extra credit on my homework assignment and try to make a useful and fun handout for my coworkers, and, modern Web enthusiast that I am, I’m going to draft it right here in public view. Given that I’ve got two days to get this done and this blog gets read so widely (chuckle), I’m not going to set up a wiki, but I’d love for anyone who does read it to offer critical feedback. For posterity, I’m going to make it a new post … to follow in a few hours (I’ve got work to do).
Sounds like a great idea — will it have pictures too?