2. Internet Neologisms

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Neologisms are newly coined terms, words, or phrases, that may be commonly used in everyday life but have yet to be formally accepted as constituting mainstream language. Neologisms represent the evolving nature of language. Over time people create new words that express concepts or ideas that were previously expressed using other words or create or adapt words for things that may not have existed at all. The technological advances and new realities that they involve lead to the coinage of many neologisms.

For example, the noun Internet is a neologism made up as a result of technology's new inventions. As you very well know, it means a world wide network of computers all linked together over the TCP/IP protocol. The Internet allows people to communicate in real time from different continents. Other examples of new words are wiki or blog.

Some old words were given new meanings, such as mail (which now means email), and these compare the old communication methods with the new ways using the Internet. There are many mixed metaphors on the Internet, such as boot (which used to mean a shoe and now is also used to describe how a computer starts up when a person presses the "on" button) and link (which used to mean a join in a metal chain and is now also the picture or word on which we click to go fast from one webpage to another). Some existing acronyms, such as "AFK" ("Away from keyboard") and "IRL" ("In real life") were used on bulletin board systems before the Internet became popular. These are now used on the Internet, such as in chat rooms and on instant messenger software.

People have also created some verbs and adjectives to describe things that only happen on the Internet: to flame is to send offensive messages, usually in chat rooms, forums, instant messaging software or email or to ping is to send some data to another computer and see how long it takes for the data to come back.

Many of these have come directly from English into Spanish and are commonly used in our language.

Source: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_slang