Not a day goes by when I don't see complex technical terms thrown around in the media or on blogs. I often wonder whether the average marketer knows what half of these terms mean. This series is aimed at illustrating (this is where the whiteboard comes into play) complex terms in ways that normal, non-geeks can understand.

In this installment, I take a look at AJAX. This is a huge Web2.0 buzzword that you hear all the time, but do you really know what it means? It's actually quite straightforward, from a marketing point of view.

AJAX Stands for Asynchronous JAvasript and XML. As a marketer, you don't need to know about Javascript, which is a programming language; nor do you really need to know about XML, which is a data storage standard.

But the asynchronous part is what is interesting. It allows Web pages to behave in a more dynamic, application-like manner.

For example, Google's Reader, Mail and Documents all work with AJAX to make them work more fluidly for the end user. Data is transmitted and stored via XML behind the scenes to enable this process to happen.

AJAX is, as a result, also partly responsible for the so-called "death of the pageview." Pages don't need to reload to get new content, thereby eliminating pageviews.