Glossary of New Media Terms

· Analytics- data and software used to report performance · App- software that is used for business or entertainment. “application”, “application program” and “software application” refer to virtually any type of program from spreadsheets such as Excel to media players such as iTunes to virtual reality games such as Second Life. However, the term specifically excludes essential control software such as the operating system · Blog- type of webpage/site of a more personal nature, generally follow a chronological narrative.

As posts appear in chronological order, most recent at top pushes earlier content down so not evergreen content · CAN-SPAM Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003- governs what/how email can be broadcast to consumers · CMS- Content Management System-warehouse (back-end) and display (front-end) content for use online- typically include a customizable outline/template for display · Cookie- message sent from a website, stored on a user’s computer as a file, accessed by the website on subsequent visits. Flash (by Adobe previously called Macromedia Flash) is a multimedia platform created by Macromedia and currently developed and distributed by Adobe Systems.

Since its introduction in 1996, Flash has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, and various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications. · Flash Drive- a small self-powered drive that connects to a computer directly through a USB port. HTML- Hyper Text Markup Language- the basic language used to display text and images on a website

· IAB Standards- The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 400 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. The most common standards you are likely to hear reference to are ad unit guidelines (dimensions, file sizes, etc. · Java -An object-oriented programming language that is platform independent (the same Java program runs on all hardware platforms without modification). · Java vs. JavaScript- Java is a full-blown programming language, whereas JavaScript is a scripting language that is much more limited in scope. JavaScript source code is not compiled into bytecode. It is embedded within an HTML page and is primarily used to manipulate elements on the page itself.

For example, JavaScript is widely used to provide drop-down menus and other interactive events on the page. Mobile App- a software application that runs in a smartphone or other portable device · Operating systems- Operating systems perform basic tasks, such as recognizing input from the keyboard, sending output to the display screen, keeping track of files and directories on the disk, and controlling peripheral devices such as disk drives and printers. provide a software platform on top of which other programs, called application programs, can run. The application programs must be written to run on top of a particular operating system.

Your choice of operating system, therefore, determines to a great extent the applications you can run. · RSS- Really Simple Syndication- technology which allows content to auto-send to user- distribution formats used to pass data to users outside of website itself. Final slide of this presentation goes more in-depth. Users choose how it displays-determine which RSS reader program they want to use. RSS parses the feed out in a way friendly to the chosen reader tool. Final slide of this presentation goes more in-depth from a user FAQ standpoint. SEM- Search Engine Marketing- A form of internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages.

Methods include: search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, digital asset optimization, and paid inclusion. · SEO- Search Engine Optimization- broad term used to describe the process of getting your website to appear as the first or one of the first choices listed when a web user searches through a search engine such as Google or Bing Social Media- Sites such as Facebook andTwitter and where users actively participate to determine what is popular. · Spiders- Computer robot programs used to search web pages to index the web for searching or classification · Web application or webapp- is an application that is accessed via web browser over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. It is also a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language (such as HTML, JavaScript, Java, etc. ) and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.

XML- Extensible Markup Language- data coding to guide display or classification of data- requires other programs to render visuals (digitization process) Glossary of digital marketing and social media terms The new terms and abbreviations used online can be confusing for someone who is new to digital marketing and the world of social media. Here is a compiled a list of some of the most commonly used words and terms to help you make sense of what people are talking about. Blog: A blog is an online journal that is updated on a regular basis with entries that appear in reverse chronological order.

Blogs can be about any subject and are usually written in a conversational style to encourage comments and discussion. Bounce Rate: the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. Call to action: words (buttons) that urge website visitors to take an immediate action, such as “Book Now,” or “Download Here. ”

Click through rate (CTR): is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the “number of users who clicked on an ad” on a web page by the “number of times the ad was delivered” (impressions). DM (direct message): This is a direct message sent to a Twitter user. One has to follow you in order to DM them. DMs don’t appear in the public Twitter stream but go directly to the receiver’s inbox. Ebook: an electronic version of a traditional printed book that can be downloaded from the Internet and read on your computer or mobile device.

Followers: people who are following you on Twitter and can see your updates/tweets. Following: these are the people whose tweets you’ve selected to read; their tweets appear in your “feed” or “stream. ” Geotagging: the process of adding location-based metadata to media such as photos, video or online maps. Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of businesses and services based on location. Google Alerts: search engines allow you to specify words, phrases or tags that you want checked periodically, with the results of those searches sent to you by email.

This form of search allows you to check whether your company, products or blog posts have been mentioned elsewhere. Hashtag: a tag used on Twitter as a way to annotate a message and group messages around a certain topic or event. You can add them to your Twiter posts by prefixing a word with a hash symbol (#) to aggregate, organise and discover relevant posts. HootSuite: is a web-based social media dashboard. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple social media profiles, schedule updates, and view metrics.

Inbound marketing: a style of marketing that essentially focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and permission marketing where marketers “earn their way in” (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc. ) Integration: as a word simply means bringing together. So social media integration means bringing together the different social media networks that you are using and making sure they all follow the same strategy. Klout: measures influence across the social web. It allows users to track the impact of their opinions, links and recommendations.

Landing page: is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Landing pages are often linked to from social media, email campaigns or search engine marketing campaigns in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements. The general goal of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads. Like – a “Like” is an action that can be made by a Facebook user. Instead of writing a comment for a message or a status update, a Facebook user can click the “Like” button as a quick way to show approval and share the message.

Link Building – an aspect of search engine optimization in which website owners develop strategies to generate links to their site from other websites with the hopes of improving their search engine ranking. Blogging has emerged as a popular method of link building. Listening: finding and monitoring the conversations that are happening online about your company, your products and services, your competitors and your industry. What is being said? Metadata: refers to information — including titles, descriptions, tags and captions — that describe a media item such as a video, photo or blog post.

Some kinds of metadata can be captured automatically from the device without needing a human to enter the data. Microsite: refers to an individual web page that is meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. The microsite’s main landing page most likely has its own domain name or subdomain. Offline: means not online, that is, not connected to the Internet. It may refer to an unconnected computer, or activities taking place without the benefit (or perhaps distraction) of a connection.

Online: means being connected to the Internet, and also being there in the sense of reading or producing content. Outbound marketing: traditional marketing methods where marketers used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in” and try to push their messages out as far and wide as possible hoping that it reaches their audience. Online reputation management: is the practice of monitoring the Internet reputation of a person, brand or business, with the goal of suppressing negative mentions entirely, or pushing them lower on search engine results pages to decrease their visibility.

Paid search marketing: is the placement of paid ads for a business or service on a search engine results page. An advertiser pays the search engine if the visitor clicks on the ad (pay-per-click or PPC). Podcast: a digital file (usually audio but sometimes video) made available for download to a portable device or personal computer for later playback. Retweet (RT): is a repeated tweet. Users add RT in a tweet if they are reposting something from another person’s tweet. It is sometimes used in a reply to allow everyone to see the original tweet. It is also used to forward a message onto one’s own followers.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication): a Web standard for the delivery of content — blog entries, news stories, headlines, images, video — enabling readers to stay current with favourite publications or producers without having to browse from site to site. Search engine marketing (SEM): is a series of online tactics that seeks to increase a website’s online visibility thereby helping to attract customers, generate brand awareness and build links. Search engine optimization (SEO): is the process of arranging your website to give it the best chance of appearing near the top of search engine rankings.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content, identifying high-traffic keywords and improving the site’s layout and design. Sentiment: A thought, view, or attitude, especially one based mainly on emotion instead of reason. Sentiment analysis allows brands to find out how people feel about their products or services, is the sentiment positive, negative or neutral. SERP (search engine results page): is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query.

The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page Social bookmarking: a method by which users locate, store, organize, share and manage bookmarks of Web pages without being tied to a particular machine. Users store lists of personally interesting Internet resources and usually make these lists publicly accessible. Social media analytics: the practice of gathering data from blogs and social media websites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Delicious, and analysing that data to inform business decisions.

The most common use of social media analytics is gauging customer opinion to support marketing and customer service activities. Social Media Optimization (SMO): is a set of practices for generating publicity through social media, online communities and social networks. The focus is on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO. Social media: refers to any online technology that lets people publish, converse and share content online, for example blogs, wikis or social networking sites.

Tags: keywords added to a blog post, photo or video to help users find related topics or media, either through browsing on the site or as a term to make your entry more relevant to search engines. Tracking: A method used to identify where a visitor has come from. Campaigns can be defined with a source code at the end of each URL that points to a particular web site. This also works for banner ads, paid directories, and e-mail campaigns. Tweet: A 140 character post or update on Twitter. Web 2. : refers to the second generation of the Web, which enables people with no specialised technical knowledge to create their own websites to self-publish, create and upload audio and video files, share photos and information and complete a variety of other tasks. Web analytics: is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purpose of understanding who your visitors are and optimizing your website. Wiki: a web page – or set of pages – that can be edited collaboratively. The best known example is wikipedia, an encyclopedia created by thousands of contributors across the world.

Introduction To New Media New media is a catch-all term for all forms of electronic communication that have appeared or will appear since the original mainly text-and-static picture forms of online communication. New media usually includes any and all of these: Online news, streaming video and streaming audio, 3-D and virtual reality environments and effects, highly interactive user interfaces, mobile presentation and computing capabilities, CD and DVD media, telephone and digital data integration, online communities, live Internet broadcasting .

The bright orange iPhone looks out of place in this ramshackle building on the edge of UofT’s St. George campus. But today’s new gadget is profoundly linked to this old place called The Coach House. Here’s where four and a half decades earlier,a philosopher named Marshall McLuhan theorized on media,technology and communication,coined some of the 20th century’s most quoted phrases—the medium is the message and the global village—predicted the Internet,and foresaw the concept of YouTube and Wikipedia.

Given that McLuhan’s prophecies on the digital revolution began at UofT,it’s fitting that his legacy is reflected today through a network of scholars from across the disciplines,who are,individually and collectively,shaking up conventional wisdom and technologies,producing dynamic new work that is changing all our lives. McLuhan 101 That iPhone belongs to Derrick de Kerckhove,French professor and director of UofT’s McLuhan Centre from1983 to 2008.

He worked with McLuhan for more than a decade as a translator,assistant and co-author and helps run The McLuhan Program,which encourages understanding of the impact of technology on culture and society from theoretical and practical perspectives,thereby continuing McLuhan’s work. Between calls,e-mails and texts to colleagues in Italy,France and the room downstairs,de Kerckhove says today’s digital era,which McLuhan predicted with “stunning accuracy,”represents a fundamental cognitive change for people and the way they communicate. By reading a book,I silence language. I’m processing what I’m reading inside my brain. But if I am at a computer looking at the screen and playing with my keyboard,there is an interaction.

There’s a reversal of the axis of cognition with the screen. This is what happens in the digital era. ”de Kerckhove says that McLuhan called this a third great phase of communication,the first phase being oral,the second literate. “Today,all three phases co-exist—we can still talk,write,read,but once we incorporate the electronic medium,the language between each of us changes. As he explains,today a book is read and then a review may be put up on a Facebook site. A reading may appear on YouTube,an excerpt on MySpace. Suddenly,de Kerckhove says,language has been externalized. It’s totally different than language on paper. “People have changed their way of representing themselves. ”

Digital media—defined In this electronic age we live in,where communication by electronic form is verging on ubiquity,digital media is difficult to define. Eugene Fiume,former Chair of Computer Science and Co-Director of UofT’s Dynamic Graphic Project (dgp),agrees. Digital media is as amorphous as you think. It’s any electronic representation of a communication—it’s any message that’s electronic,from your cell phone activity,your power point slides,word processing documents,text messages,e-mails. It’s an electronic representation of content of various sources. ”In short,digital media is really about an entire ecosystem—from the content itself,the electronic representation,to the way it’s manipulated,stored,how meaning is extracted from it,how content is created and the problems that create the content.

Fiume adds,“Digital media is all of these things—it’s potentially emancipating and constricting all at the same time. ” The consumption and dissemination of digital media is a phenomenon unto itself. YouTube,which allows anyone to both consume (by watching) and disseminate (by posting) content of all kinds,is an incredible study in digitalmedia. It was designed to move people away from having to worry about how content is rep-resented to how it is used. In fact,the reason for YouTube’s success is its very usability. One click uploads your video.

Another allows you to embed a pointer to a video in an e-mail message or blog,and so on. YouTube’s success has also generated a wave of new ideas about how products are developed and marketed. Viral marketing,for example,today relies on digital media and the quick reaction that one gets from it. And one just needs to look at the success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to be convinced of the pivotal role digital media can have on managing issues,voter turnout,campaign momentum and fundraising. In terms of research,digital media provides possibly the perfect storm of interdisciplinary scholarship.

At UofT,there are over 100 lead investigative teams working in the areas of digital media technologies or multimedia,culture,and entertainment,imaging and diagnostics,e-health applications,digital learning,social innovation,high performance computing and more. The social scientists are interested in looking at how some classic research problems are being changed by the propagation of digital media. The engineering scholars are examining the “plumbing”for digital media—coding and storing media,increasing battery power for mobile devices and constructing digital media tools that require low battery power.

Anthropologists are interested in how we behave in these new communities created in the digital age. Economists are wondering about the new economies and models of purchasing and consumption digital media creates. Political scientists are intrigued with the effect digital media has on communicating issues widely,democracy and even human rights and the Inter-net as a public space. Then there are the computer scientists,who take a particular form of digital media and get interested in some scientific aspect of it. UofT’s digital media mavericks The animators & the gamers

Fiume is immersed in the world of digital representations,computer graphics that focus on realism—under-standing what makes something convincing. “We’re a bit obsessed with not only the mathematical and physical aspects of how realistic computer graphics are done and also how effective they are—the neuroscientific and psycho-social aspects of graphics,”he says. “What is it that makes something convincing? ”The research involves first making mathematically physically plausible models,taking whatever they can from biology and physics and representing them into a numerical approximation that can be done on a computer.

Fiume and his colleagues have a long history of creating algorithms for realistic animation—fire,smoke,hair,physically correct light sources—in the dgp. In fact,some early scientific work in the dgp on the visual modelling of natural phenomena such as clouds,water,smoke and fire was licensed and transferred to industrial computer graphics software that has been used in virtually every film production since that has required special effects. The computation time required for physically realistic graphics is very high.

Real-time graphics for gaming technology requires the computation of a new image every one-thirtieth of a second,and as such may require visually plausible short-cuts. “So we’ve got those of us who are purists who want to do as effective as possible a job in capturing the mathematical relationship in computer graphics versus the people who need to make them go really quickly. And they’re going to take advantage and going to work backwards from the specific capabilities of the computer,”says Fiume. “It’s a little like engineering the rest of the car to achieve a certain speed once you’ve already got your engine.

The social innovators New media’s ability to boost democracy in the digital era is a phenomenon,and nowhere has that been more apparent than at UofT’s Munk Centre for International Studies where political scientist Ron Deibert directs The Citizen Lab—a research centre focusing on the intersection of digital media and variations of world and civic politics,human rights and global security. Deibert and a team of students research and develop technology that explores the political dimensions of digital media,especially in an international ontext. “From the beginning,my aim was to create a hot-house environment where I could bring together computer scientists,engineers,graphic designers and others to work on common projects under my direction,”he says. Together with collaborators around the world,Deibert has developed a global counter-intelligence operation,run through civic networks,that’s university-based,oriented toward unearthing,documenting,monitoring and reporting on breaches of human rights online in the digital media environment.

His circumvention software,psiphon,operates using social networks of trust. Users in uncensored locations install psiphon on their computers and give the connection information to family or friends in censored locations,allowing them to surf the Internet through the computer in the un-censored location. Built upon the software application is psiphon inc. ,spun out of the Citizen Lab (with assistance from U ofT’s Innovations Group) to provide circumvention services to clients who are interested in knowing what web content of theirs may be filtered. We see ourselves very much as,in part,a due diligence organization,actively tracking and monitoring how various individuals are exercising their power in the world digital media environment and we want to make sure that they are doing things the way that the are saying they’re doing,in a way that doesn’t violate human rights. ” Toronto and UofT—digital destination When McLuhan talked about the global village,he envisioned “electronic mass media collapsing space and time barriers in human communication”—the globe turned into a village by the electronic mass media.

But Richard Florida,director of UofT’s Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management,has a slightly different take. He believes that while technology has indeed made the world smaller in many ways,urban,physical places have a major role to play in the technological revolution—because it’s in these hubs that the creativity needed to drive innovation,such as digital media research,resides. Ever since the new media emerged,experts have said it will make place less and less important. Nothing can be further from the truth,”he says. “In fact,new media is occur-ring in real places from Silicon Valley in California and New York’s Silicon Alley to Helsinki and Tokyo. ”And,he adds,Toronto is poised to join the ranks of the world’s leading new media hubs with great research,great technology,world-class media and thriving music,film and artisticscenes.

What gives Toronto the potential to be a leader in digital media research is largely fuelled by research at UofT. There is not only a volume of work going on,but expertise and access,through connections to the hospital system,the financial system,and the arts community. Paul Young,U of T’s Vice-President,Research,agrees and stresses the importance of expanding collaborative work in new media. “We’re very open to collaboration and we’re actively building private sector and institutional partnerships. “

Seamus Ross,the new dean of UofT’s Faculty of Information is astonished by the richness of the digital media initiatives in Toronto and at UofT:“Everything from the technology side to the arts and culture to traditional forms of digital media applications such as cataloguing and databases—it’s stunning,”says Ross,who comes to UofT from the University of Glasgow and whose own research interest is the documentation and management of digital materials so that they’re accessible and usable for the long term. Where is digital media going? As Derrick de Kerckhove reminds us,McLuhan said our technologies are way ahead of our thinking.

Fiume says that as social beings,digital media will continue to allow us to define the relation-ships we want with people. Deibert’s hope is that we can enjoy the benefits of digital media such as the Internet,in a free and open,uncensored manner. Ross believes it will continue to define and challenge the role of libraries,cataloguing and preservation. Florida predicts it will continue to define innovation and breed creativity. Wherever digital media is headed,UofT scholars are,like McLuhan before them,asking the questions and providing many answers to what lies ahead in the digital age.