Learn Net lingo

People who began living their virtual life in Yahoo chat rooms know well ‘what ASL stand for’ A decade ago, it used to be the first question before beginning a chat session with unknowns on the Internet. The question has become redundant for the Facebook generation. The basic information about a person is easily accessible for anyone having an account on the social networking website. There are thousands of similar abbreviations, acronyms and jargons which are used in the online world very often.  This week we bring you a list of some of these words which have been forgotten over the years or have been coined recently.

ASL—It stands for Age, Location, Sex. The term was popular among  people using the Internet for chatting. It was used to find our  age, location and gender of the person  at the other end.  Over the years the usage of the term has minimized, especially after the evolution of social networking sites.

Most of us want high bandwidth speed for fast Internet connection. Bandwidth of an Internet connection tells about the rate of data transfer to and from a computer. The word is used to assess the speed of an Internet connection.  The higher the bandwidth the faster will the Internet speed  be.

 ISP— Internet Service Providers (ISP)are those that provide access to the Internet. In simple words, the company that provides you access to the Internet through cable, dongle, Wi-Fi or  for that matter by any means is known as an ISP.

All of us use search engines such as Google and Yahoo to get answers  to our queries. Boolean search is a kind of search that broadens or narrow search results on the basis of Boolean logic. One can use ‘and’, ‘not’ or ‘or’. False drops are the search results which are undesirable and most times they are the outcome of a mistyped search query.

Cyber space/virtual world—Internet is known as cyber space or virtual world also. The term is especially referred to show the life of people on social networking or blogging sites. None of the dictionaries has a word ‘defriend’ but it is used on Internet when someone removes a  name from his or her friends list. 

Cookies-—Cookies are small encrypted text files that have information about the website users are visiting on a computer. Some websites do not allow access if cookies are disabled on a browser.

URL-—Universal Resource Locator is a web address for accessing resources on the web. All the documents and files on the Internet have specific URLs.

FTP— File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is one of the most used protocols for sharing content between two servers.

CMS— Content Management System (CMS) is a programme that is used for maintaining and updating content on a website. Uploading, editing or modifying of content can be done using the programme. Dynamic websites and blog sites such as Wordpress, Blogspot, Typepad and others use CMS.

Tags and Meta tags—Tags and Meta tags are used in a website to make the content of the website easily available to Internet users.

Other terms which are  in use in the online world  are  IM (Instant Messengers), Request for comments (RFC), Feeds and several others.