Photo Finish With The Best: 8 Photography Contests You Can Win With Your Best Snap

Contest. That word has a charm of its own. Ever since the days of the cavemen right till today’s Olympics, the brave and the meek have gone up against each other. A contest has a simple pull – all of us want to know and show if we are the best. Even on the comparatively egalitarian World Wide Web, it is a barometer for a self-pat on the back. We have online photography contests of all kinds; from the recent best body and fitness contests to regularprogramming contests. Google contests are used by a big company as part of their promotion strategy. Graphic lovers have their Photoshop contests.

Photographers aren’t in any way left out. In fact, they seem to be the most proactive lot when it comes to contests. Bakari showed us someawesome free photography contests. So, let’s launch into some more popular photo contests and pit ourselves against the best of the rest.

National Geographic – Your Shot

Calendar Date: Always Open

The National Geographic photo contest can either make you go “wow”, or make you feel inferior if you are starting out with your DSLR. National Geographic is one of the more preeminent places to take your photos to. If any of your photos get selected, then it is the best badge to say that you have finally arrived. Your Shot is the magazine’s photo community which invites regular submissions from photographers of all hues.  Whether a hobbyist or a pro, you can participate fearlessly. National Geographic editors review each submission carefully and the best 12 get picked in the popular Daily Dozen category.

The best thing is that the editors also offer professional tips which are an invaluable learning experience. The publication of photos in the magazine or the website is reward enough for any photography enthusiast. The guidelines are explained here in more detail.

The Smithsonian Phototography Contest

Calendar Date: Annual (open till November 29, 2013)

Another renowned name, but one you may not immediately associate with photography. But you will be surprised to know that the Smithsonian magazine’s photography contest has its own place. Standards are of course, very high. You can enter any of the five categories — the American Experience, the Natural World, People, Travel and Altered Images – to win cash prizes. The grand prize winner gets $2500. Read the complete FAQs here.

Wiki Loves Monuments

Calendar Date: September (expected)

It’s printed in large letters — The world’s largest photo contest. It is also certified by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest photo contest in the world. Not really surprising because it was organized by the Wikipedia community. The contest started off in 2010 in The Netherlands. By 2012, it was held across 35 countries and garnered 350,000 photo submissions. The international photo contest is meant to showcase the cultural heritage through monuments of each participating country.

Though the contest for this year is yet to be announced, you can still see the latest uploads coming into the site. The photos are all freely licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

Pixoto

Calendar Date: Weekly

Pixoto is a photography contest of a different kind, and one which makes it the easiest to participate. The photo service uses an algorithm called ImageDuel to submit each photo to a comparison and voting process. The photo with the best positive feedback (an image score) wins. There are dozens of categories and each top photo can win $150 every week. Others among the top 20% can get badges to display alongside their profiles and photos on the site.

ViewBug

Calendar Date: Always open

ViewBug is a photography community with a few contests of its own. There are premium (paid) and free contests to go along with the free and premium plans the site has for you to join. The free membership allows you to participate in the free contests. There were about 16 contests going on at the time of writing this article. Awards include photography kits, pro-memberships, and exposure. Some of the categories are unique – from photographing subjects floating on water to capturing scenes by looking up.

World In Focus

Calendar Date: Annual (to be announced for 2013)

PDN’s World in Focus is a travel photography contest which is awarded separately to amateurs and professionals. There is an entry fee for this contest – amateurs ($22) and professionals ($45). The contest is open internationally. The submission date for this year’s announcements has passed, but it could be worthwhile to wait and prepare for next year. The contest closed in October last year, and the winners photos were published in March 2013. Winning entries are featured on the website and in the magazine.

No Man’s Art Gallery

Calendar Date: Annual (to be announced for 2013)

The No Man’s Art Slum Photography Contest is an annual photography contest held exclusively for kids in an underprivileged neighborhood in the world. The winning photo is exhibited in the art gallery of the organization. Children are taught how to use a camera in a workshop and then given a free rein to express themselves and their lives with photos. The site says that Plans for 2013 are to give the children in the slums of Capetown the opportunity to experiment with photography. Though this is not a usual photography contest, I decided to mention this for its novelty, and also to show how photography can be used for the charitable good. You can also sponsor a participant with your contribution.

World Press Photo

Calendar Date: Annual (February)

This is the definitive site for photo journalists to come and win an award for their profession. The World Press Photo Awards are the world’s largest and most celebrated annual press photography contest. The non-profit organization holds the contest annually. The 2013 awards were announced in February. Photos are submitted across a wide range of categories that also include arts and entertainment, portraits and nature. The awards have been held for 55 years and are meant to showcase the often dangerous, often invaluable work of photo journalists.

The Best Way to Be In The Know: Photo Contest Directories

The best way to be completely aware of the next photo contest around the turn of the calendar is through photo contest tracking websites. Subscribe to their RSS feeds or Twitter updates. But do keep them bookmarked. Here are three of the more comprehensive ones I found.

• The Photo Contest
• The Photo Contest Directory
• Photography Competitions

You have to enter to win. That’s the slight trouble you have to take with contests. I have tried to mix this article up with some high-brow contests, and a couple which you can enter more easily if you are an amateur photographer. But there are photography contests all around us, some local, some national, and international like the ones above.

Photography contests aren’t about winning prizes alone. They are also about being part of the wider photography community and taking our photography learning to a new level. Have you taken your best snaps and put them to the test on a photo contest? Tell us about the best photo contests out there; because there are so many.

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Internet Forums Reimagined: The Future Of Online Discussions

Last year, I wrote about the history of online communication and how it has evolved all the way from online bulletin board systems to social media. But what does the future have in store for us in terms of communicating online?

The latest iteration of online communication may indeed be social media, but it seems that the most popular avenue is still the old-fashioned internet forum. It remains today as an excellent way to structure a community on the web. While social media can be somewhat amorphous at times, forums provide order and a sense of home.

I believe that forums will never die out, but forums will evolve and adapt to advancements in web technology. Please join me as I take a look at a few forum software systems that are so innovative that they’ll transform the concept of the forum forever.

Moot

Moot (Beta) is a very interesting project in my eyes because there’s a bit of tension in its design philosophy: it wants to take a step back into the past and recover the lost relevance ofmeaningful discussion (which they claim have died with social media) while incorporating features of the future (clean and responsive interface).

But more importantly, Moot is entirely embeddable, meaning you don’t need to download a package and upload it to your own web host. Instead, all of the data and control is done through your Moot account and your forum theme; forum content are embedded directly into your site wherever you want it to go. It has been designed from the ground up for complete and easy integration.

Other notable features that Moot is pushing:

• Both forums and comments. Moot is a full-fledged forum embed system AND a comment embed system. Unlike other forum systems where comments are just normal forum threads with their post data molded and displayed differently, Moot lets you embed unique comment threads onto pages using one line of HTML. Each comment thread is unique, dynamic, and separate from your forums.
• No content deletion. Moot is taking a hard stance: deleting posts and comments disrupts the natural progression of a discussion, resulting in an incomplete thread that’s harder to follow. Therefore, once content is older than 2.7 minutes, it cannot be deleted. Also, if a post or comment has received any replies or likes, it can’t be deleted.
• Complete control. Even though Moot is a third-party service that you have to embed onto your site, you will have full control over it. You can alter the design using CSS. You can also alter the behavior and extend Moot functionality using an API that will be released in the near future.

Discourse

The mentality spurring the Discourse team is the desire to “raise the standard of discussion on the web through better forum software.” Core to their actions is the belief that forums are an integral aspect of proper web communities, yet most forum designs are stuck in the 1990s. With Discourse, they want to make forum hosting easy, flexible, and appealing to the 21st Century.

The Discourse interface takes a lot of inspiration from social media: just-in-time loading of content, flat and sleek aesthetics that are indicative of social media design, @replying to users, logging in with social media accounts, real-time stream updates, and more. But unlike Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and the others, Discourse remains faithful to big blocks of text for deeper, more meaningful conversation.

Other notable features that Discourse is pushing:

• Notifications. One big problem with legacy forum systems is the lack of convenient notifications. Up until a few years ago, the best we ever got was clunky email notifications, then we had RSS subscriptions, but both of those had their limits. Discourse will regularly notify you on the site when someone mentions you, replies to you, quotes you, or anything else that involves you.
• Forked conversations. Instead of having a linear thread where users reply to multiple users in a single post (often using ugly blocks of quotes to establish context), Discourse allows discussions to fork by letting you reply to individual posts and branch off.
• Smart interactions. One awesome feature of Discourse is that you can begin writing your reply even before you’ve finished reading the thread. The reply box will follow you no matter where you are on the page, which means you can reply while you read. Also, when you prematurely leave a thread (maybe you had to go somewhere), Discourse will remember your place and start you there the next time you come back.
• Dynamic moderation. As users participate on your Discourse forum, they gain something called trust. Users that have trust can help with forum moderation by culling spammers, flamers, and trolls before they get too big.

We took a detailed look at Discourse when it emerged on the scene.

Vanilla

Moot and Discourse are relative newcomers to the forum scene, but Vanilla has been innovating the forum concept for years already. Honestly, ask anyone (who has forum experience, obviously) which forum software is the most non-traditional and I’m willing to bet that most would say Vanilla.

Vanilla has gained a lot of traction over the years. Big name sites, like Penny Arcade, are starting to turn to it for their discussion needs because of its cutting edge design. This is a free, open source project that really is revolutionizing the forum landscape.

Other notable features that Vanilla is pushing:

• Scalability. One major issue in many free forum systems – and some paid systems too – is that they buckle under too much traffic. When it takes over 10 seconds for a thread to load, users are too frustrated to continue a discussion. Vanilla is built for speed and can handle millions of users right out of the box.
• User reactions. With Vanilla, you can set various “reactions” that users can have to content: like, dislike, spam, off topic, insightful, funny, or whatever else you can come up with. These reactions have actions associated with them (e.g. add score to the post). The result of the user reactions system is that users can decide on and promote valuable content.
• Built-in gamification. Gamification describes the addition of game elements in a non-game context for the purpose of engaging users. By participating, users can earn badges (achievements) and reputation (score) which lead to user promotions and access to more features if you choose to set it up that way.

Conclusion

On paper, these systems may not seem like a huge deviation from the usual forum platforms that we typically see. However, paper can be deceiving. Take one look at each of the solutions above and you’ll notice a landslide difference in the end user experience. And in my humble opinion, all three systems are doing a heck of a job in refreshing the boring realm of forums.

Do you use forums? Know of any other forum systems that are revolutionizing the field? Please share with us in the comments!

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Like And Share Carefully: How Marketers Target You On Facebook

So let’s get this out of the way: if you’re a Facebook user, you’re like cattle. To the website, you are not a unique individual. Instead, you’re part of a collective. You are just one of many consumers that other companies want access to in bulk.

However, is it so wrong to graze in the green pastures of social networking? Perhaps not. I’d even go as far to say that, in actuality, the Facebook-to-user system is a symbiotic relationship that strays a bit from our initial livestock analogy. The social network provides us with a means to communicate with our friends and loved ones, and we provide the social network with real, in-depth, accurate market samples that they can sell as a product.

Even still, some businesses will go beyond Facebook’s usual advertising methods in an effort to target their desired market. They use a variety of tactics, and while they are not illegal or against Facebook’s terms and agreements, they might be worth knowing about.

Open Wall Popularity

Facebook presents itself as being all about community, and for us end-users, it is. On the other hand, to businesses, it’s simply a way to put the entire target market under one roof and address it all at once. With that said, businesses are now forgoing traditional customer service routes and using their Facebook walls as their public representatives. By presenting themselves as members of the community, businesses are able to communicate more effectively with consumers.

To be honest, this isn’t a bad idea. However, this offers just one more way for consumers to get sucked into loads of advertised promises. Once they know that a company is personal, they are more inclined to trust this company. In short, it’s the modern day equivalent to the old mom and pop stores where the owner knows everyone’s name. Besides that, certain posts and comments addressing issues by the business are more likely to be shared.

Representation Through Images

Images are a serious tool for getting things done in the Facebook marketing world. In fact, you could consider them to be a bit like billboards on your news feed. However, Facebook has a few guidelines for certain images that businesses post – else, they can get in a bit of trouble. For instance, cover photos on pages can’t feature price or discount information, a call to action, or a request for users to Like and Share (which inherently is a call to action). In other areas, it’s not much of an issue. However, do you really want an advertisement on your news feed when there are already enough on your sidebar?

With that said, non-advert images play a heavy role when it comes to Facebook marketing. How many times have you seen your friends share images of athletes, humorous photos, or classic memes that they didn’t upload? Upon further inspection, you may see who the image was originally posted by, and in many cases, a watermark from a company’s logo may be added. This allows for the company to get the attention of its market and then let its presence be known without using annoying ad-like images.

A Call To Action

Whenever you look at business pages for Facebook (including MakeUseOf), you’ll see loads of “LIKE OR SHARE THIS TO…” posts. This is known as a a “call to action” seeing that it requests that users do something. Typically speaking, traditional calls to action are something along the lines of “Call for more information” or “Shoot us an email” so they can make a connection with you. In this case, the company is connecting with you and using you as a means for free advertising.

Sometimes, as with the case of the images, there may be no call to action. The company may simply share an inspiring status update or a hilarious image, knowing that for some reason some users will feel the need to like or share it. You see, Facebook has already established the call to action for them. It’s right there under every post: Share or Like.

Conclusion

Facebook has changed the face of business, advertising, and marketing forever while also changing how we communicate. It’s a bit peculiar though. While you and I interact using Facebook, there are tons of businesses out there doing the exact same thing, trying to be like us. They are trying to fit into the community – trying to be our friends. In fact, they might even be a bit like other Facebook stalkers.

What other methods have you seen businesses use to target consumers on Facebook? Have you seen these methods yourself?

(By the way, don’t forget to Like and Share this post on Facebook.)

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Like And Share Carefully: How Marketers Target You On Facebook

So let’s get this out of the way: if you’re a Facebook user, you’re like cattle. To the website, you are not a unique individual. Instead, you’re part of a collective. You are just one of many consumers that other companies want access to in bulk.

However, is it so wrong to graze in the green pastures of social networking? Perhaps not. I’d even go as far to say that, in actuality, the Facebook-to-user system is a symbiotic relationship that strays a bit from our initial livestock analogy. The social network provides us with a means to communicate with our friends and loved ones, and we provide the social network with real, in-depth, accurate market samples that they can sell as a product.

Even still, some businesses will go beyond Facebook’s usual advertising methods in an effort to target their desired market. They use a variety of tactics, and while they are not illegal or against Facebook’s terms and agreements, they might be worth knowing about.

Open Wall Popularity

Facebook presents itself as being all about community, and for us end-users, it is. On the other hand, to businesses, it’s simply a way to put the entire target market under one roof and address it all at once. With that said, businesses are now forgoing traditional customer service routes and using their Facebook walls as their public representatives. By presenting themselves as members of the community, businesses are able to communicate more effectively with consumers.

To be honest, this isn’t a bad idea. However, this offers just one more way for consumers to get sucked into loads of advertised promises. Once they know that a company is personal, they are more inclined to trust this company. In short, it’s the modern day equivalent to the old mom and pop stores where the owner knows everyone’s name. Besides that, certain posts and comments addressing issues by the business are more likely to be shared.

Representation Through Images

Images are a serious tool for getting things done in the Facebook marketing world. In fact, you could consider them to be a bit like billboards on your news feed. However, Facebook has a few guidelines for certain images that businesses post – else, they can get in a bit of trouble. For instance, cover photos on pages can’t feature price or discount information, a call to action, or a request for users to Like and Share (which inherently is a call to action). In other areas, it’s not much of an issue. However, do you really want an advertisement on your news feed when there are already enough on your sidebar?

With that said, non-advert images play a heavy role when it comes to Facebook marketing. How many times have you seen your friends share images of athletes, humorous photos, or classic memes that they didn’t upload? Upon further inspection, you may see who the image was originally posted by, and in many cases, a watermark from a company’s logo may be added. This allows for the company to get the attention of its market and then let its presence be known without using annoying ad-like images.

A Call To Action

Whenever you look at business pages for Facebook (including MakeUseOf), you’ll see loads of “LIKE OR SHARE THIS TO…” posts. This is known as a a “call to action” seeing that it requests that users do something. Typically speaking, traditional calls to action are something along the lines of “Call for more information” or “Shoot us an email” so they can make a connection with you. In this case, the company is connecting with you and using you as a means for free advertising.

Sometimes, as with the case of the images, there may be no call to action. The company may simply share an inspiring status update or a hilarious image, knowing that for some reason some users will feel the need to like or share it. You see, Facebook has already established the call to action for them. It’s right there under every post: Share or Like.

Conclusion

Facebook has changed the face of business, advertising, and marketing forever while also changing how we communicate. It’s a bit peculiar though. While you and I interact using Facebook, there are tons of businesses out there doing the exact same thing, trying to be like us. They are trying to fit into the community – trying to be our friends. In fact, they might even be a bit like other Facebook stalkers.

What other methods have you seen businesses use to target consumers on Facebook? Have you seen these methods yourself?

(By the way, don’t forget to Like and Share this post on Facebook.)

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Facebook Search Sucks – Use Facebook Email Notifications As A Workaround [Weekly Facebook Tips]

Facebook is more than just a tool to stay in touch with friends or waste time. Sometimes people post valuable information that you may want to refer to later. So how do you find an old post on Facebook, if you barely remember the content, let alone who posted it or where? Facebook doesn’t exactly make this convenient.

While there are several ways to find stuff on Facebook, they are all but comprehensive or reliable. This situation also forces you to spend even more time on Facebook, increasing the likelihood that you will get distracted. One way to increase your chances of finding something and thus waste less time, is to enable Facebook email notifications. As I explore the benefits of email notifications, I will also show you other ways to search Facebook.

Why Would I Need Facebook Email Notifications?

Facebook Email Notifications are useful for two main reasons. First, you can read updates without visiting Facebook. Second, you are creating a searchable archive of those posts.

Facebook is an incredible time sink. It’s tough not to scroll down your News Feed or view the notifications that have accumulated since your last visit. The best thing you can do to escape this drift is to visit Facebook less. Email notifications allow you to do that and at least partially fight your FOMO (fear of missing out) because you will receive notifications of important posts and events.

At some point in the past Facebook retired its old Wall and Timeline search option. Recently,Graph Search was introduced, but it doesn’t really search posts on your Timeline or News Feed. So when you want to find a post or a comment in which you were mentioned, you have to manually search Facebook, for example by expanding the relevant time frame in your News Feed and using your browser’s search feature. If you have Facebook email notifications enabled, however, you can simply use your email client’s search tool. With Gmail’s filter andsearch features, this is super convenient.

Alternatively, you could download your Facebook expanded archive and search it. However, it can take several hours before your archive is ready for download. It also gets outdated the next day, and it doesn’t contain group posts.

Presently, it’s possible to search within groups. However, it’s unpredictable which features Facebook will remove or otherwise alter. So if you rely on the group search option, it’s better to be on the safe side and also collect group posts via Facebook email notifications.

How Can I Enable Facebook Email Notifications?

Facebook offers a range of ways to receive Notifications in the respective section underAccount Settings. Besides email notifications, you can enable visual and audio notifications on Facebook, push notifications, and text messages.

For email notifications you have two options:

• All notifications, except the ones you unsubscribe from
• Only notifications about your account, security and privacy

You can unsubscribe from:

• Pokes
• Friend confirmations
• Friend suggestions
• Friends added based on your suggestions

Once you have enabled email notifications and made a choice what to unsubscribe from, note that you can further customize email notifications under the What You Get Notified Aboutheader.

Particularly interesting are notifications that concern activities of close friends and groups you are a member of. Note that you cannot opt out of activities that involve you, for example when someone comments on a post of yours.

Won’t These Notifications Clog Up My Inbox?

No, because you know that they are coming and you will take care of them in advance. What you need to do is set up an email filter. Your email client should allow you to automatically mark the notifications as read, make them bypass your inbox, and sort them to a separate label or folder. We have previously outlined how to set up email filters in Gmail, Yahoo, andThunderbird.

Conclusion

Facebook email notifications can be set up in a way that doesn’t bother you, and generally can be very useful. They can serve as a partial archive, become a valuable resource when searching for information, and by allowing you to avoid Facebook they might even save you time.

If you are still not finding what you are looking for, you can try external services likeSocialSearching. From my own experience I must report that they are slow and unreliable, but maybe you are more lucky.

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Those Crazy Web Words And Phrases Explained

There have been more new words invented in the last decade than ever (Disclaimer: I made that up, but stand by it on the basis of the “it’s probably true principle”) – all thanks to this new fangled “internet” thing. It’s easy to see how us old folks, and by old I mean anyone over the age of 25 – might get easily lost.

Whether it’s on your child’s chat messages or some inexplicably popular item on Reddit, this new language increasingly pervades the meat space of real life. Let me put you a little at ease ease though, as I explain some key terms.

Meme

A term coined by Professor Richard Dawkins in the 70s to describe the way culture spreads, now used in common parlance to describe viral videos and pictures that go on to generate thousands of variants.

A classic example is keyboard cat – a cute YouTube video of Carlie Schmidt’s cat playing an electronic keyboard – which later came to be added on the end of bad videos as a way of saving them: play him off keyboard cat!

LOL, Lulz, and Lolz

All variants of the original acronym for Laughing Out Loud, an abbreviated way of exclaiming ones amusement. A more extreme form is ROFL; or rolling on the floor, laughing; and LMAO, laughing my ass off. Lulz, as a plural of LOL, is often used as a reason for doing something – “doing it for the lulz” – and inspired the name of Lulzsec hacking group, responsible for exposing some incredibly lax security protocols in use by major governments and corporations around the globe.

Lolled, lolling and lollage are all grammatically correct forms of usage. lolwut is a type of bemused lolling, for example:

Dave: Yesterday I forgot to wear my pants.
James: lolwut?

Of course, nothing on the Internet is immune to the influence of our feline mistresses (see thecute cat theory of digital activism); and so it came to pass that some bright spark combined the concept of “lol” with “cat”, to create the lolcat – amusing images of cats, captioned with often grammatically incorrect short sayings. Though by no means the original lolcat, perhaps the most iconic is icanhazcheezburger

… which went on to spawn a network of LOL sites.

Some say the humble lolcat has dumbed down an entire generation so much that it only communicates in captioned photos. I blame Twitter.

Troll

As the Greater Internet F******* Theory states (aka online disinhibition), any normal person when provided both an audience and the anonymity of an internet forum, may undergo anegative personality change – they may turn into a troll. A troll takes many forms, but most commonly posts a deliberate inflammatory comment in order to elicit a response (baiting).

Trollface has become a meme of its own, originating in a webcomic found on Deviant Art. It represents the expression made while trolling.

One particular tactic trolls have successfully employed in the past is to pose the question:

48÷2(9+3) = ?

which results in either 2 or 288, depending on the order of operations you apply (FYI, the answer is 288, stupid). Even calculators will give differing results, but that’s not the point: the argument will almost always divulge into personal insults, and thus the trolling objective is complete. By playing the game, you have already lost.

Flaming is closely related to the concept of trolling, but now refers to more personal attacks; one can troll quite effectively without resorting to flaming.

RickRolled

Rick Astley, an 80′s legend that gave us Never Gonna Give Up, recieved Internet notoriety when the music video for the aforementioned masterpiece became a class Bait and Switchbit of trolling. It goes like this: a nefarious prankster posts an obfuscated URL, which when clicked takes the hapless victim to the Never Gonna Give You Up music video on YouTube. The user is said to have been rickrolled.

Fun fact: during the 2008 Macy’s Day Parade, Rick Astley live-rickrolled onlookers in a surprise appearance.

Even Obama got in on the act..

#hashtag

A hashtag is a keyword denoted by the hash # symbol, used on the Twitter social network to group posts about a single topic. Media events will often establish their own #hashtag, in hopes of trending globally. Trending hashtags are shown on the main Twitter site to all users, and show which are currently the most popular things being talked about, so they’re a highly coveted accolade. According to dailydot, the 10 most popular hashtags from August 2011-2012 were:

1. #moscow, following the questionable election results.
2. #arsenal, because apparently people care more about football than freedom.
3. #takemeout, an ITV dating gameshow.
4. #freedom, a concept difficult to define – but 140 characters is enough for some.
5. #nadarkhani, a pastor sentenced to death in Iran for denouncing Islam.
6. #whatimissmost, a conversation starter for reminiscing about the past.
7. #arabidol, an attempt to duplicate the success of UKs Pop Idol singing contest.
8. #waystogetoffthephone, in which 677000 people suggested tips on how to end an awkward phone conversation.
9. #tweetforyoucef, an example of what happens when more than one hashtag is used for a single topic (in this case, pastor Youcef Nadarkhani).
10. #twalculate, a silly app for calculating various stats about your Tweeting habits.

Some people also use hashtags in Facebook updates, which is pointless, because it doesn’t actually do anything and just makes you look silly. Don’t make the same mistake.

While we’re on the topic of Twitter, retweet deserves a mention too; referring to the act of copying someone else’s amazing Twitter messages, and republishing them to your ownfollowers. Credit is given, and RT is added to let readers know they’re not your own words.

LiveStream and LiveBlog

A live video broadcast of an event or gaming session. Yes, watching someone play video games is a legitimate past time now, and you can have a go at livestreaming or watching too. A LiveBlog is predominantly text-based live broadcast using a blog page that automatically refreshes to show the latest additions – used at events where filming would be difficult, though photos are also posted to the stream.

Further reading

I can’t possibly cover all the new words of the web – I have my own cat pictures that need captioning with mildly amusing phrases – but if you’d like to read more, check out these great resources:

• NetLingo
• Internet Slang
• Urban Dictionary, an NSFW resource for all new words and phrases, not just internet related
• Netymology: From Apps to Zombies: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World– an actual book, whatever they are.

I hope you’ve at least enjoyed if not learned something from this, otherwise you’ve probably just wasted 5 minutes of your life. #fail.

Know an essential term you think everyone should know? Add it in the comments!

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