Where internet terms came from.....

Spam

 In the legendary 1970 Spam sketch from the TV comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a café waiter recites a menu that only contains spam and dishes containing spam. As the waiter recites the menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drown out all conversations singing “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!”. They in effect ‘spam’ the dialogue. The excessive use of the word ‘spam’ in the sketch was mirrored online in early chatrooms where abusive users would repeat ‘spam’ many times until it scrolled other users’ text off the screen. Since then, the word spam has been used for excessive multiple posting and junk messages.

Blog

Blog is an odd word, which means an online diary that’s usually viewable by the public. The word actually comes from a blend of the two words ‘web’ and ‘log’. A web log was the first name for an online diary, and was coined in December 1997 by Jorn Barger. The shortened name ‘blog’ was first used by Peter Merholz who broke it up into the words we blog in 1999. After that, the word ‘blog’ has been used as a verb and a noun, and lead to the word ‘blogger’ and ‘blogging’.

Twitter

I don’t have to tell you I’m sure, that Twitter is a microblogging social networking website where you can post messages of no more than 140 characters to your followers. But did you know that the original name considered for Twitter was ‘twittr’, inspired by Flickr. The creators changed this to the full word we know now when it was launched in July 2006. Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s creators said this about the name they chose:

“[W]e came across the word ‘twitter’, and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds’. And that’s exactly what the product was.”
                                                                                                                       -Jack Dorsey

Silver surfers

Older people surfing the internet are sometimes referred to as ‘silver surfers’, a term that was coined after the internet became widely used and available in most people’s homes, and was adopted by older people as well as young people. The term actually comes from a Marvel comic book hero ‘The silver surfer‘, who surfs the galaxy at faster-than-light speeds, but it was (unflatteringly?) applied to elderly internet users because of their grey hair.

Google

Have you ever wondered where the popular search engine got its name from? It’s actually a deliberate misspelling of the word ‘googol’, a mathematical number meaning 1 followed by 100 zeros. The name of this number was coined by the young nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938. Edward asked his 9 year old nephew to think up a name for a very big number, and came up with ‘googol’. He then came up with the name of an even larger number which was a ‘googolplex’.

source: http://blog.silktide.com/2011/05/trivia-for-geeks-where-internet-related-words-come-from/