Android Home Screen (image from WikiCommons)

Anrdoid is a free mobile phone operating system. It is based on the Linux operating system and was created by Android Inc, which was later purchased by Google.

The code for the Android operating systems is now open source and overseen by the Open Handset Alliance. Google is still seen as the main driving force behind the project.

Like Apple’s iPhone, Android mobiles support multi-touch interfaces  installation of new applications on the phone, many of which are free of charge.

Most Android devices are made by HTC who were the first mobile manufacturer to adopt the operating system.

The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is an interesting development that enables web designers and developers to use the technologies used to build web sites – HTML, Javascript, Flash – to build applications that are used on the desktop.

The types of applications being built with AIR are those that integrate closely with websites. Some are used to follow and analyse information published by web sites while others are used to updates web sites and blogs.

Because they run on the the desktop and not in a web browser they can offer more features and access and save files on the local hard drive or network. AIR also has built in database for storage and synchronisation so you can work offline and then synchsronise the information to your website at a later date.

At present AIR runs on Windows and Mac OS X. A version for Linux is available to developers and a version for mobile devices is in development.

There is a wealth of free content available on the web and the most common form is article marketing.

Article marketing can be used in 2 ways:

1. you write articles about  you specialist subject, service or product and provide them free of charge for others to publish on their web sites, blogs and newsletters.
2. you publish other peoples' free articles on your own web site to supplement you own content and increase the amount of useful content available to your visitors.

The Benefits Of Article Marketing

When you provide articles for others to use, they  include a credit to you and a link back to your web site. This helps in raising the profile or you or your organisation and it brings some more visitors to your web site.

When you republish free articles written by others, this can increase the number of visitors that you receive from search engines because you have added more keyword relevant content to your site.

Using Articles Marketing

There are a number of directories where you can publish you articles for others to find and where you can also search for articles to use on your own website. When using free articles always observe the terms of use and make sure that you are not reliant on free articles to provide the majority of the content for your website.

ASP is Microsoft's means of creating dynamic web pages. Web pages break down into two basic types; static or dynamic

In a static web page, the creator of the page uses HTML to build it, then uploads it to the server. When someone visits the page, the same content that the designer created is downloaded to the visitor's computer and displayed in their web browser. A dynamic page differs slighlty. It also sends HTML to the visitor's web browser, but before it does this, it checks to see if there are any instructions it has to carry out first.

These instruction usually consist of filling in a template with an article or the details of a company. The content used to fill in the template is stored in a database. Once the template has been filled in with the details from the database the page is downloaded to the visitor's web browser  in the same way as a static page.

An avatar is a representation of a human on the internet or in a virtual reality environment. Avatars are used as a form of personal branding; a means of creating a recognisable identity.

The term derives from Hinduism where it refers to the bodily  incarnation of a higher being or god on Earth.

In the online world there are two forms of avatar. A simple 2-dimensional icon, of the type that people use in discussion fora and on blogs, and the 3 dimensional type which are used in games and virtual reality spaces such as Second Life.

ADSL or Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line is what is usually called broadband. It is much faster than a traditional modem over a telephone line because it uses "spare capacity" on the telephone line. The asymmetric aspect of it is that upload and download speeds are different. Because the majority of our interent usage involves downloading information, the download channel of ADSL is much faster than the upload channel.

When you register a domain name, you need to supply three different points of contact for the domain (although these can all be the same person).

The three contacts are technical, admin and billing.

An Admin Contact is specifically responsible for approving any changes to the domain record, including changes to the three contacts. The main time you need to use the admin contact is when transferring a domain to a new registrar.

Apache is the name of one of the most common web server software packages in use today.

Web server software is used to deliver the pages and other documents that go to make up a web site to the computer of the person visiting the web site.

Apache is available free of charge and runs on many different operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Many web hosting companies offer Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) as a low cost hosting environment. This provides and web server, database and programming environment for free, which can be used to host very small or very large web sites.

Web server software such as Apache can host thousands of web sites on one computer (web server) and serve millions of requests for web pages every day.

AdSense is an advertising system provided by Google that enables web site owners to easily display advertisements on their web site.

Once the website owner has signed up for an AdSense account they copy and paste some code into their web pages and advertisements appear each time a visitor comes to their web site.

The web site owner does not need to build relationships with advertisers as advertisements are automatically displayed based on the content of the web page.

The web site owner earns money each time a visitor clicks on one of the advertisements to visit the advertisers web site.

AdSense is a very easy to set up and low maintenance means of generating income from a website.

This term has come to mean website usage statistics because Google provide a free statistics package called Google Analytics.

Web site analytics can measure information such as the number of visits to a web site, which countries the visitors are from, which pages they look at and what percentage of your visitors revisit your web site.