Britons are increasingly tech-savvy but are still bamboozled by tech jargon.
According to research from Nielsen/NetRatings, people are buying cutting-edge technology but often don’t understand the terms that describe what their device actually does.
So while 40% of online Britons receive news feeds, 67% did not know that the official term for this service was Really Simple Syndication.
Terms such as podcasting and wikis are still meaningless to many.
Really Simple Syndication!?!
What the BBC article doesn’t mention is that geekspeek still baffles geeks. RSS could stand for 3 things:
- RDF Site Summary
- Rich Site Summary
- Really Simple Syndication
RSS 2.0 always stands for the latter but I guess the second is also acceptable. RSS 0.9 and 1.0 can stand for either one of the first two. Then there is the Atom camp which sometimes defines RSS as "Really Stupid Syndication".
Podcasting
Then there is podcasting. Apple doesn’t seem to want people to use the term anymore as it’s hurting their trademark on the iPod. Microsoft have in the past called it blogcasting. Creative tried to call it Zencasting. And some people insist on calling it an audio feed or a "Personal On-Demand Broadcast"
Acronyms for Fun
I dug up an old blog entry of mine where I listed around 200 technology-related acronyms. If you’ve got a spare few minutes, see how many of them you can decipher 