What is...

There's lots of jargon and acromym-speak out there in the tech world and sometimes it can be hard to wade through it all, especially when something new and hot appears on your radar and you want ot get a handle on it. Well, for the last year or so O'Reilly has been publishing a series of "What is..." articles their web site. They are meaty, substantial and very high quality, especially good at placing the technology or trend in context. Of course, this is to be expected from a company with the reputation of O'Reilly, but it is always nice to see reality match reputation.

There are over 50 of the articles available and needless to say many of them are highly relevant to the library world. So, if you want to do a little catch-up, here are some of the highlights (and another link to the main page):

• What Is .NET by James Avery
  
• What Is a BlackBerry by Dave Mabe
  
• What Is Bluetooth by Michael Juntao Yuan
  
• What Is C# by Jesse Liberty
  
• What Is Flickr (and Hot Tips for Using It) by Giles Turnbull
  
• What Is On-Demand Computing by Stephen B. Morris
  
• What Is Phishing (Or, How to Fight Phishing at the User-Interface Level) by Lorrie Faith Cranor, Simson Garfinkel
  
• What Is Podcasting by Phillip Torrone
  
• What Is Skype by James E. Gaskin
  
• What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly