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The Internet has created its own vocabulary. Here are some basics:

Browser: a software program that's designed to explore the Net. Explorer, Foxfire, Safari are the most common ones.

URL: this is the address of a site, found at the top of the browser window. It usually begins with http://www  . . . 

URL shortener: Sites that will take a long URL and shorten it. I've used two here: tinyURL.com and bit.ly.com. (One advantage of bit.ly over others is that it tells you how many people have clicked on a link.)

Link: this is a URL address.

When it's underlined, it's a "hot link," which means that when you click it, it will open in a browser to that site.  You have to be connected to the Internet for a hot link to work.

Author Website: a site that contains information about an author.

Domain name: a URL that is a name, usually followed by dot com. For example, my domain name is http://www.sandragulland.com.

Blog: a site where someone regularly writes about something, rather like a columnist for a newspaper. Blogs are often (but not always) interactive: people make comments and the writer of the blog responds.

Post: something published on a blog. It can be an essay, a photo, a link, or all of these combined.

Net 2.0: Sites on the Net are often interactive now. People post comments, interact with each other. For this reason, it's called the Social Net, or "Net 2.0."

Your posts to a Social site are sometimes called your "status" or "update."

HTML (HyperText Markup Language): this is the code that defines everything you see on the Net, the bones of the Net, as it were. Fortunately, now, you don't really need to understand it, but there will be times when it will rear its ugly head. Don't panic.

Captcha: this is the test where you are asked to type in the letters that you see. The neat thing about captcha is that one of the "words" is from a scanned text that was indecipherable by the scanning software, so each successful captcha response helps to digitize and preserve an old document.

Widget: usually this is a software gadget that can be added to your blog or website. 

Going viral: When something on the Net catches on and word is spread wildly. It's the Net version of "word-of-mouth" and what every author dreams of.