Spider

A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler.

Because most Web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines, like Alta Vista, have many spiders working in parallel.

Splog

Short for spam blog, it's a slang term used to describe blogs that are established only to promote affiliate Web sites in order to help those sites achieve a better search engine page ranking.

Podcasting

Podcasting is similar in nature to RSS, which allows subscribers to subscribe to a set of feeds to view syndicated Web site content. With podcasting however, you have a set of subscriptions that are checked regularly for updates and instead of reading the feeds on your computer screen, you listen to the new content on on your iPod (or like device).

The format used for podcasting is RSS 2.0 with enclosures. The podcasting enclosures refer to all binary (non-text) downloads. You can read the text description of the enclosure before downloading the item to view.

Bookmark

(v) To mark a document or a specific place in a document for later retrieval. Nearly all Web browsers support a bookmarking feature that lets you save the address (URL) of a Web page so that you can easily re-visit the page at a later time.

(n) A marker or address that identifies a document or a specific place in a document.

AJAX

Short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, it is a term that describes a new approach to using a number of existing technologies together, including the following: HTML or XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, the Document Object Model, XML, XSLT, and the XMLHttpRequest object. When these technologies are combined in the Ajax model, Web applications are able to make quick, incremental updates to the user interface without reloading the entire browser page. [Source: mozilla developer center]

ATOM

Atom is the name of an XML-based Web content and metadata syndication format, and an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources belonging to periodically updated Web sites. All Atom feeds must be well-formed XML documents, and are identified with the application/atom+xml media type. [Source: AtomEnabled]

Whois

An Internet utility that returns information about a domain name or IP address. For example, if you enter a domain name such as microsoft.com, whois will return the name and address of the domain's owner (in this case, Microsoft Corporation).