Word on the Street. November 9, 2006

The Cloud – Synonym for the Internet. Coined because of all those network illustrations in books that frequently show the Internet in a network topology as one of those grade-school-simple clouds.

AMVs – Short for “Anime Music Videos,” amateur videos that take excerpts from Japanese anime and mash them together with a popular piece of music. The term has been around for a while but YouTube has made them all the rage.

Ratpacking – Gangbanger term for swarming the target of a gang assault using mobile phones and two-way pagers to coordinate the attack.

Floats – The latest in painfully annoying advertising; those little ad boxes that hover above the content and won’t go away until you dismiss them. Especially insidious because they’re not separate windows but part of the Javascript code within the underlying page (thereby bypassing pop-up blocking tech).

Digg!