So, this time 3 months ago I thought “CMS” was the name of an IT company based in North London (incidentally the last place I worked!), “PPC” was the Public-Private Coalition, “E-marketing” was something you definitely wouldn’t tell the police you did, and “Hosting”… well that was obviously hosting – what you do (with varying levels of success) when your friends or family come round for dinner.

Truth be told, I wasn’t really that bad – I’d obviously had some exposure, albeit mainly as a user, to the web - but it just goes to show the extent to which changing from one part of an industry to another can seem like moving to a foreign country.

Prior to joining the Chameleon clan, I’d spent eight years providing advice and selling both hardware and software solutions to medium and large sized companies to ensure that in the event of a disaster (or more likely a system failure) their valuable data was backed up, securely stored and more importantly retrievable so that it would be business as usual as soon as possible.

I knew my LTO drives from my Super DLT’s from my SLR’s and VXA’s and could reel off the features and benefits of a host of autoloaders, libraries and disk arrays and advice what backup software worked best with each (actually I probably still could!). More importantly, I knew what these acronyms meant and could (rather condescendingly at times) explain all this to my clients.

Imagine then the shock to my system when I realised that I had a whole new language to learn and that I’d be the one asking for explanations for terms that had completely different meanings in my “other” world!

Fortunately for me, all of the existing Chameleon’s have proved to be talented bi-lingual interpreters so the language barrier has not hindered me to any great extent and in fact I’m beginning to pick up a lot of the local lingo!  Nowadays, chats with clients and prospective clients are liberally peppered with terms and acronyms such SEO, Web2.0, EPR, W3C, WAI, Link Building - I could go on but I won’t - and I've nearly always managed to convince them that whilst I may not be a native (yet), I’ve certainly been living on the island for a while.

So with the help of my fellow Chameleons, Wikipedia, www.acronymfinder.com and of course Google, I am now well on my way to becoming a fluent “Webspeaker” and looking forward to increasing my vocabulary on a daily basis.