Mainsail Newsletter

19 September 2000

We created Main Mail to keep you up–to–date on the latest activities in the Interactive world. Each newsletter will cover an online development that affects how we communicate with our target audiences, provides insight into future business trends or demonstrates a major change in a client's industry–with a minimum of jargon or confusing tech-speak.

We want this newsletter to be informative, interesting and interactive — please help us as we continue to modify the newsletter by sending us your comments, critiques and story ideas or issues that you'd like to see covered in the future. You can reach the Main Mail staff at mainmail@mainsail.com. Also, please pass the newsletter on to others that might benefit from this information.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Mark White
President, Mainsail Web Development


	Visit Mainsail's Internet Resource Center (MIRC)! The MIRC site is full of information, slides and other aids for PR account teams to integrate Web components into every facet of PR campaigns and new business plans.



	Mainsail glossary
	HTML
	XML
	Flash
	JAVA
	Broadband
	MIRC

Speaking in tongues, i.e. making mouth noises in a language most people don’t understand, is usually something to be avoided at all costs, unless your religion awards extra points for demonic possession, or you’re Dutch.

But hang out with anyone who works on the Internet (which pretty much means the bulk of civilization today), and you’ll quickly hear a stream of jibberish that makes the military’s fondness for obscure terminology sound like the Queen’s English.

And it’s not just the easy stuff like bandwidth, spam and HTML (um, that’s short for "hypertext markup language" which is used to build web pages, but don’t worry, it’s soon to be replaced by "extensible markup language," or XML). Today, acronyms morph faster than Disney’s interactive strategy, which can leave even the savviest modem mouseketeer scrambling for a dictionary published since July.

For example, last winter, "p2p" (cool kids don’t capitalize acronyms anymore) meant "path to profits," something most "b2c" (business-to-consumer) sites failed to include in their business plans, which led to a rash of returned Ferraris in Silicon Valley after Christmas.

Then along came Napster and its innovative "peer-to-peer" file sharing software that allowed users to trade illegal, immoral and usually incomplete songs by Metallica directly from each other’s hard drives. Within seconds, peer-to-peer got hacked down to, you guessed it, "p2p." Of course, you could argue that a true p2p includes p2p, and it hardly even matters which definition of p2p comes first.

Wave your eyes over the glossary of web terms on the left, especially before you start talking to clients about an interactive program. Or even better, come visit Mainsail' s Interactive Resource Center to find a full web glossary, PowerPoint slides, presentations and other aids to making interactive mainstream.

You may not always know what you’re talking about, but frankly, neither do your clients.

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