Technology for dummies (myself included)

In Thursday’s Merced Sun-Star, I wrote a story about a trip Merced Union High School representatives took to Apple headquarters in Cupertino. There, several tech-savvy terms were mentioned that most of the Merced visitors – including myself - had never heard.
So, after a lot of Web searches, I came up with some basic explanations of those words for those of us who still haven’t even mastered text-messaging on our cell phones.
One was Gogglejockeying, which is the practice of surfing the Internet for terms, Web sites and ideas on any given topic, then usually displaying those searches on a single screen for an audience.
Avatar was another term. Avatars are Internet users’ personification on a Web site or computer game. For example, on secondlife.com, people create a Web-version of themselves by choosing everything from body shape to hair color, then interact with other Avatars as they would in real life--except they are in a virtual world. These avatars can buy real estate, shop for clothes and even go on dates and get married to other avatars.
Mashups, another one of the terms I mentioned, is a Web application that combines information more than one source, usually Web sites. For example, a person could take photos of the California missions from a picture-sharing site and then place them on a state map from a Web site about geography.
FaceBook is a Web site where people create personal profiles, then network with other people around the globe. Like MySpace, many people use the site to connect with old friends or make new friends with similar interests.
MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. These types of online role-playing video games allow a large number of players to interact with each other, usually in a fantasy-based, online-created world. Examples of these games include World of Warcraft and EverQuest.

That's our tech lesson for today. And please don't text-message me with your responses.