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Ivy Wigmore, Content Editor
Alexander B. Howard, Assistant Editor
Margaret Rouse, Director
Lowell Thing, Founder WhatIs.com® is a knowledge exploration and self-education tool about information technology, especially about the Internet and computers. It contains over 4,500 individual encyclopedic definition/topics, a number of "Fast Reference" pages and learning tools. The topics contain about 12,000 hyperlinked cross-references between definition-topics and to other sites for further information. The site is constantly updated. Started as a dining room table experiment in hypertext, WhatIs.com quickly turned into a useful repository for what couldn't be easily remembered. Launched in September 1996 with 350 alphabetized words about computers and the Internet, WhatIs.com's audience grew rapidly, reaching one million page views a month by late 1998. In 1999, PC Magazine editors voted WhatIs.com one of the five best sites about information technology. In January 2000, WhatIs.com was acquired by TechTarget and became a kind of portal for over 16 other information technology Web sites. By September 2003, WhatIs.com was being visited over a million times a month, serving over 50,000 visitors each business day, and delivering five million page views a month. Much of the value of WhatIs.com derives from its "page bonding" with 16 other specialized TechTarget Web sites that enrich the reader with original IT news, tips and advice from over 100 IT experts, Webcasts, discussions, and white papers. Today, WhatIs.com increasingly is going beyond "handy look-up" to becoming a place where the IT professional can quickly learn and master new concepts, technologies, skills, and products. Among our learning tools are a series of fast education 10-step "Learn IT" pages that explain, summarize, cross-refer, and test the reader about a complex subject. WhatIs.com also provides Fast Guides for doing specific tasks, quizzes, a series of Learning Paths in which you can learn by reading definitions in sequence, and a number of popular Fast References, including Every File Format in the World, Mathematical Symbols, and The Speed of...(a table comparing data rates). Between 75% and 80% of our audience are IT professionals and many of them engage with our site. Suggestions, links, and comments have been received from over 10,000 contributors (many listed on our Credits page) representing over 60 countries. Users can subscribe to a daily "Word-of-the-Day" by registering at WhatIs.com. |
