Social Media Vocabulary: Trolls and Widgets

ByAndrea Rickett

troll, social media vocabulary, social media classes, social media, marketing, entrepreneurAt Salty Waffle, we are incredibly stoked to tell you all that we are still number one on Google for searches on ‘social media vocabulary‘! We love talking social media and translating for some of you out there so this is really awesome to us. Enjoy this week’s edition!

1. Troll: There are some pretty rough definitions for so-called trolls out there, but basically a troll is a person that just really hates what you have to say and dedicates an unusual amount of time to arguing against your points, posting inflammatory comments, or writing ill of you or your website. You can’t really win if you pick up a troll unless you manage to turn them, but be careful, they can be powerful, scare off other readers, and poke holes in your credibility. (Justly or not)

2. Podcast: Podcasts have been around a long time now and it is actually exactly the same as a non-streamed webcast. Quite simply, a podcast is an audio file, usually mp3, that you can download, listen to online, or put on a media device for later playback. Radio shows often offer podcasts of their shows and many people ‘blog’ via podcast. (The term podcast took over webcast because iPods became so popular.)

3. Web 2.0: I think the best definition of this is actually this picture. Web 2.0 in its simplest definition is a description of the movement online toward collaboration, information sharing, social media, and the applications that support that.

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4. Widget: these are stand-alone applications that you can embed on other applications or web pages. Functions of widgets are diverse and can do pretty much anything a programmer can build it to do. Universal widgets are especially helpful for non-technical people that can embed them in their own sites with ease and gain increased functionality. We have widgets all over our page to perform different tasks and we didn’t have to build them!

5. Wiki: a wiki is a web page, or group of pages that can be edited collaboratively. Wikipedia is the most well-known example of this and they have a more complex definition of a wiki if you want to delve in.

Add words you want to know about in the comments and they could be here next week!