I know…I know, the dreaded vocabulary lesson. You thought those were finished in school? No such luck. I guess one of the coolest things about the English language is that we are always moving forward and expanding our vocabulary. We have the largest number of words of any language in the world. Possibly because as Americans we create, build and evolve our lifestyles faster than anyone else.

But before we get to the vocabulary lesson…let’s have a little history lesson. We have always implemented words from other languages and cultures into our lexicon but most recently we have been bombarded with brand names that rapidly became part of our daily language.

Best example of this was when I was watching a movie and someone used the term google as a verb. What? When had google become a verb? The line in the movie was “We’ll google it when we get home.” I google. You google. We google. Can you hear someone in a language class having to conjugate google? It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

Do you say Kleenex or tissue?

It all began back in first half of the 20th century when Americans started the marketing revolution. Don’t get me wrong, people were marketing before then but with the advent of mass production, a rapidly expanding population and the dawning of wonder of all wonders, radio and then television, marketing shifted into an entirely new realm. My how times have changed!

That’s when vocabulary really changed. If you were too successful in your marketing you lost control of your brand name and it got added to the English dictionary. For example, Kleenex.

So on to the vocabulary lesson. I am going to list some of the words that you may or may not be familiar with to help you with the rapidly changing terminology in our daily lives. So if someone asks you “Do you tweet?” You can say “No, but did you see Al Roker’s tweet yesterday? It was off the chain.”

Social Media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social Networking is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, sexual relationships, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade.

Web 2.0 is perceived as a second generation of web development and web design. It is characterized as facilitating communication, information sharing, interoperability, User-centered design[1] and collaboration on the World Wide Web. It has led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and web applications. Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies.

Blogs (a contraction of the term "weblog")[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Bloggers a person who keeps and updates a blog Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates, known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Tweet is a posting on Twitter by a Twitter user. Linked-In is a business-oriented social networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003[1] mainly used for professional networking. As of May 2009, it had more than 40 million registered users,[2] spanning 170 industries. My Space is a social networking website with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos for teenagers and adults internationally.

SEO the use of various techniques to improve a website's ranking in the search engines and thus attract more visitors.

Webisodes is a short episode which airs initially as an Internet download or stream as opposed to first airing on broadcast or cable television. The term has been largely deprecated in favor of the simpler 'episode'. The format can be used as a preview, a promotion, as part of a collection of shorts, or a commercial.[1][2] A webisode can be part of an already established drama or series or it may consist of entirely original material. Depending on its purpose, the webisode may or may not be considered a part of an established program's continuity. Apps is a small software application primarily downloaded to handheld electronic device.

Wikipedia There were several historical antecedents to the wikis, which is the name used to refer to a website with pages that can be edited by any visitor. One of the earliest precursors was Vannevar Bush's vision of a microfilm hypertext system which he called the "memex" (1945). Other precursors were an early collaborative hypertext database called the ZOG (1972), and the Apple Computer hypertext system called HyperCard (1987). However, the creation of the first wiki website only became possible with the development of the hypertext protocol of the World Wide Web (1991) and graphical web browsers such as the Netscape Navigator (1994). In order to facilitate communication between software developers, and also to experiment with the new hypertext capabilities, Ward Cunningham created the first wiki, which he called WikiWikiWeb (using the Hawaiian word "wiki" in place of "quick"). Cunningham went public with the first wiki in early 1995, inviting a selected group of programmers to participate in the experiment.

Bing is a web search engine (advertised as a "decision" engine [1]), Microsoft's current incarnation of its search technology. Unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, Bing is a replacement for Live Search. It went fully online on June 3, 2009,[2] with a preview version released on June 1, 2009. In its first few weeks Bing has been successful in gaining some marketshare.

Thanks to Wikipedia who supplied definitions for most of these terms.