Halloween Tech: Weird, Spooky and Odd Technology Terms

Zombies, Smurfs and Wolfpacks, oh my!

In our never-ending quest to gather terms and information for Webopedia, we have found many acronyms and tech terms that strike us as being odd, weird or just plain spooky. To celebrate Halloween tech-style, we’re bringing you a fun — but totally legit — list of some of the spookiest acronyms and tech term oddities we’ve come across while compiling the Webopedia database.

Who knows, maybe one of the following tech terms will spawn a costume idea that will bring first place at this year’s office (IT) Halloween party.

Seriously, we didn’t make these up…

ProStores: DIY Web Shop for Merchants and eBay Sellers

ProStores offer subscription-based Web shops for eBay sellers and online merchants. New features are designed to boost Web shop sales and help you better manage your Web store.

EBay sellers can use ProStores to open an “off-eBay” Web store that completely integrates with their eBay account information, listings and settings. 

One of the biggest challenges eBay sellers — who use both eBay and their own store — face is avoiding “double selling”.  Fortunately ProStores synchronizes eBay listings and Web shop inventory. If an item sells on eBay, it will not appear as available for purchase on your ProStores Web shop (and vise versa).

Even if you do not currently use eBay, you can still use ProStores to create your own Web shop. 

ProStores: DIY Web Shop for Merchants and eBay Sellers
By Vangie Beal, October 29, 2009

TRUSTe Offers Privacy Services for Small Businesses

TRUSTe offers a new service to help small online businesses get a professional privacy policy in place and secure Web sites to boost consumer confidence.

A survey by TRUSTe showed that fifty-six percent of small business owners have no privacy policy in place. Even worse —the study revealed that one-third of small businesses admitted that they cut-and-pasted a privacy policy from another Web site into their own site. Not only can this damage your own business and the business you steal a privacy policy from, but it is also creates a risky situation for your site visitors.

TRUSTe Offers Privacy Services for Small Businesses
By Vangie Beal, October 19, 2009

Publish eBay Listings on Social Sites with Page Mage

Page Mage, an eBay Compatible Application, which launched in beta last August, has recently upgraded its service to include social networking features for eBay sellers, along with a new pricing structure.

Using Page Mage, you can improve your eBay selling page by listing items in a more interactive and engaging way. For example, you can embed video, show eBay image galleries, or add scrolling text to any eBay auction or fixed-price item listing when you use the Page Mage service.

Chris Taylor, vice president of marketing, said that the newly added social features are designed to help sellers reach out to friends and their network of friends on some of the more popular social media sites.

Page Mage: Publish eBay Listings on Social Sites
By Vangie Beal, October 14, 2009

SEO Marketing Tips: Optimize E-mail Campaigns

SEO is a great compliment to e-mail marketing. Wendy Lowe from Campaigner offers tips to help you optimize your e-mail marketing campaigns for search engines.

To take advantage of SEO, you need to archive your e-mail campaigns online—on your own Web site or blog. On your Web site, you should offer links to your past newsletters right from the main page navigation. Not only will this provide new content for your site visitors to read, but you will also get more mileage out of relevant content when you repurpose your e-mail campaigns.

Wendy Lowe, Campaigner’s director of product marketing says that SEO and e-mail are a great compliment to one another. She continued, “Using SEO best practices can really help you hone in on what customers are searching for.”

SEO Marketing Tips: Optimize E-mail Campaigns
By Vangie Beal, October 12, 2009

EBay Adds Top-Rated Badges, Ups Buy-It-Now Conditions

This week eBay rolls out the new Top-rated Seller program, retires some listing features, and also adjusts “Buy it Now”. Plus, Vendio helps sellers easily change policies across all live listings.

This month, when top-rated rolled out, a number of sellers who met the requirements were not invited to the program because they were not PowerSellers. Information provided by eBay in a previous announcement indicated that qualifying sellers who were not PowerSellers would not receive an invite to top-rated until April of next year. Being excluded from the top-rated seller program right before the rush of holiday sales was the biggest issue for sellers.

The topic had many sellers upset and frustrated, however Brian Burke from the Seller Standards Team used the official discussion forum to tell sellers that if they qualify for top-rated now—including those who do not have PowerSeller status but meet $3,000 U.S. sales per year— they would receive invites for the PowerSeller program the week of October 11th. This will make those sellers eligible for top-rated status around October 20th.

While the official clarification helped, some smaller sellers posting to the discussion forum believe that top-rated will continue to hurt their eBay business by making their listings near-impossible to find and less appealing to buyers in eBay search results.

EBay Adds Top-Rated Badges, Ups Buy-It-Now Conditions
By Vangie Beal, October 7, 2009

Text Messaging Demystified

The Webopedia Guide to Understanding Online Chat Acronyms has been updated with definitions to more than 1,180 chat abbreviations. I know… SRSLY, GTFO! DIS 1180? YGTBKM!

(Seriously, get the *freak* out! 1180? You got to be kidding me!)

Using Google Trends to Choose Article Keywords

Google Trends is a goldmine for online article writers. As a writer, not only do I need to write compelling content, but I also need to think about using good keywords to help drive Google search engine traffic to the article when it is published.  

Let’s pretend I am going to write an article on computer security. I could consider any of the following titles:

• 5 Computer Security Tips
• 5 PC Security Tips
• 5 Windows Security Tips 

To help me choose the best title for the article, I use Google Trends to see how frequently the keywords and phrases I am considering have been searched for in Google.  Google Trends will show you the average search traffic for the terms you enter in the search box.

Here are the steps to do this:

• Go to Google trends at http://www.google.com/trends
• In the search box type: computer, PC, Windows (notice the keywords are separated by a comma) and click “Search Trends”.

The resulting graph shows the frequency your keywords were used in a Google search query. In this example Windows is searched for the most, followed by PC then computer.

Google Trends: computer, PC, Windows

 I’ll do the same test again, this time using “computer security”, “PC security”, and “Windows security”. In this instance, Windows Security is still the most popular search; however computer security is more popular than PC security.

Google Trends: computer security, PC security, Windows security

For this article, I would use “5 Windows Security Tips” as the title, provided it was a precise match for the content of the article (remember you have to write for humans first and engines second). For a more general security tips article I would use “5 Computer Security Tips” in the title of the article.

You can also quickly check Google Trends when trying to decide between using a singular or plural form of a word or to see if people search for formal words or its slang variation more often.  For example, “bike” is used more frequently in Google search queries than “bicycle”, and “classified ads” is far more popular in searches than “classified ad.”

You can use Google trends to compare up to five comma-separated keywords or keyword phrases at one time.