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We encourage people to use this glossary in presentations, teaching materials and other documents. Select the terms you think are most appropriate for your audience and use them in resources.

Avatar—a personalized graphic file or rendering that represents a computer user or user’s alter ego, often used on Web exchange boards and in online gaming; can be a real-life digital photo, but is more often a graphical representation.

App—a web application, accessed over the Internet, for a mobile device (e.g., smartphone, tablet) that works much like user-installed software on a computer allowing the device to perform specific tasks.

Bandwidth –also called “data transfer rate,” the amount of data that can be carried online from one point to another in a given time period, usually expressed in bits (of data) per second (bps) or bytes per second (Bps). Dial-up Internet accounts, which use a standard telephone line to connect to an Internet Service Provider (ISP), have a very narrow bandwidth (about 50 Kbps or 50,000 bits per second) and take a long time to download data. A broadband Internet account can move data at anywhere from 128 Kbps to 2,000 Kbps or more and can download large files, such as video files, much faster.

Blog—from “web log,” a regularly updated personal journal, conversation, commentary, or news forum on virtually any topic that is published on the Web and may include text, hypertext, images, and links; typically displayed in reverse chronological order, blog posts invite comments from readers creating online communities of individuals with shared interests over time; updating a blog is “blogging,” someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger,” and blog entries are called “posts.”

Botnet—a network of private computers, each of which is called a “bot,” infected with malicious software (malware) and controlled as a group without the owners’ knowledge for nefarious and, often, criminal purposes; computers are typically infected when users open up an infected attachment or visit an infected website.

Browser—short for Web browser, a software application that locates, retrieves, and displays information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Popular browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.

Byte—a unit of digital information commonly consisting of eight “bits” (a binary unit and the smallest increment of computer data) used as a measurement of computer memory size and storage capacity (usually in terms of MBs or “megabytes,” and GBs or “gigabytes”). Bits and bit rates (bits over time, as in bits per second [bps]) are also commonly used to describe connection speeds.  Continuar leyendo «GLOSSARY… términos usuales y cotidianos!»