Technology is expanding at an ever increasing rate, and terms like "podcasting" and "blogging" are now commonplace, but what do they mean? This guide is a basic introduction to help you keep up with it all...

AdSense - AdSense is a program run by Google, which allows people with a webpage or blog (see next definition!) to make extra income. After being accepted into AdSense, you are given a short amount of code, which you can paste into your web and blog pages. This code essentially looks at the content of your pages and chooses relevant adverts to display. Whenever a visitor clicks on one of these adverts, you are paid an (undisclosed and varying) amount of money. Never click on your own ads or you'll be banned though!

Blogging - a blog, short for web log, is like an online diary. The verb "to blog" means to make an entry into your blog. Blogs tend to be frequently updated and anyone can have one, and post (= write) whatever content they like. Many people and now companies/employees have their own blog in which to voice their opinions, thoughts or anything else. Someone who blogs (=keeps a blog) is known as a blogger.

Pinging - When you have written an entry into your blog, you'll want other people to know it is there, so you need to 'ping', or send a signal. There are hundreds of sites that you can 'ping' that will list your blog. You may have to register with some of them, but mostly not. For the technically minded, ping is an acronym for "Packet Internet Grouper"

Podcasting - is creating an audio file that people can download onto their PC, Mac or portable music player to listen to at their convenience. Think of a podcast (= the audio file) as an audio blog. Again, anyone can have a podcast, but they are more restrictive in that the files can be quite large and so you probably have to pay for some space to store them online.

RSS - stands for "really simple syndication" or "rich site summary" and is a method whereby you can syndicate your site's content. Put simply, if you create an RSS feed (=file) of your website content, anyone can display this content on their site. Conversely you can display other people's information on your website - just look for a logo, usually orange, that is labelled "xml" or "RSS" to see whether they have content that you can use.

This guide is only meant as the briefest of introductions - for more information a google search is probably the best place to start, or of course, there are plenty of e-books on ebay itself!