Such was the case with the following note. Valerie Cox wrote us to explain a problem with our definition of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black):

‘CMYK is a scheme for combining primary pigments. The C stands for cyan (aqua), M stands for magenta (pink), Y is yellow, and K stands for black.’

The K does not stand for “black,”  it stands for “Key.”  The key color in today’s printing world is black, but it has not always been this way.   During the early days of printing, the colors used for Key have been brown, blue, or black, whichever was the cheapest ink to acquire for the times.”

We should have guessed there was more to that story… we’ve read our alphabet books and we do understand how initialisms work: A is for Apple, K is for… something that starts with K.

Read more about acronyms and initialisms. (It’s interesting. I promise.)

Thanks to Ms. Cox for making us look just that little bit smarter today than we did yesterday!

Enter bit.ly. Bit.ly was created by Betaworks, the NY-based software concern that created Summize. Summize was recently acquired by Twitter, if you’re not following the rapidly evolving Web.20 startup space.

Dave Winer used a post announcing the launch of bit.ly on scripting.net to explain why bit.ly fills a number of other needs:

“They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from. They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I’m pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we’re not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.) Here’s the info page for this post.

And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs. Here’s the XML readout for the shortened link to this post.”You can use your own keywords to the URL, organizing your links like tags.

Winer also notes that he’s a minority investor in the service, so while you can take his words with a grain of salt, try the service out and weigh its merits for yourself.

 I will say,  however, that bit.ly is easily the best URL shortener I’ve used to date.  It accomplishes its core mission quickly and easily, converting long URLs to short ones on the bit.ly homepage or using a bookmarklet you can drag to your Web browser’s toolbar. (It’s even kinda cute; note the blowfish mascots on the right.)

If you’re a Web developer or simply a data geek, the ability to pull all of the data about a given shortened URL through a XML or JSON interface will be quite helpful for analyzing your traffic and audience behavior.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of bit.ly’s other nifty features:

• display your 15 most recent shortened URLs below the entry field
• tracking of both clicks on shortened URLS and referring pages
• an API for creating shortened URLs from web applications, which is quite useful is you’re a Web developer
• automatic creation of thumbnail images that can be displayed on a webpage next to shortened URL

If my excitement about bit.ly doesn’t move you, Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted a glowing review of bit.ly at ReadWriteWeb that thoroughly explains why bit.ly is worth a try, along with an endorsement of bit.ly’s advanced URL tracking capabilities by Lifehacker.

If you like bit.ly, please recommend it to others. The larger the bit.ly community grows, the more effective and useful this nascent index of the Semantic Web will become. That’s because bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters. All the data gathered is available in public RSS feeds. bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of the database of submitted links.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/HGz8Csoh9cI" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Newsgator’s software was part of presentation by Lockheed-Martin on the results of its own 18-month project. “Project Unity” combined Google’s Enterprise Search Appliance (ESA), Newsgator’s Enterprise Server and Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS). Newsgator powers their feed management and reading experience. I’ll be writing about Unity in a future post.

You can hear more about Social Sites 2.0 from Brian in this Social Sites 2.0 podcast. (MP3)

Thanks to Andrew for all of his hard work researching and pulling them together — and to the delicious community, as always, for highlighting the achievement by collectively bookmarking it to the top.

The Colombian graphic designer affectionately known as “Mao” took a break from working towards his master’s in information systems design to go through thousands and thousands of applications and bring us his list of the best of the best. As he says, none of them will replace Photoshop, Flash, InDesign, Quark or other professional applications, but the price is right!

I’ve loved GIMP for a while, but, I have to admit, most of these were new to me. Thanks, Mao!

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code.

If you’re a particular flavor of Alpha geek, the concept of “pipes” is nothing new. In fact, naming this project “Pipes” was a deliberate nod to the Unix programmers that, over the years, have done extraordinarily clever things by connecting simple utilities together using pipes built on the command line.

So the concept of pipes has been out there for years — but creating a fluid, visual and (mostly) non-technical interface that enables non-coders to create mashups of sites like Craigslist and Google Maps may be. Tim O’Reilly certainly thinks so. He posted that Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is “a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.”

Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodney believes that Pipes ” will unlock the data web.” Six Apart’s Anil Dash writes that Pipes “lets users with a relatively low degree of technological expertise combine structured sources of web data such as feeds.”

How user-friendly do you think it is? Try it out and let us know about your experiment in the comments.

The Wall Street Journal Online thinks that “This is the kind of software the internet has been crying out for.”

What do users get for their money that isn’t available for free elsewhere? A robust CMS, an elegant user interface, beautiful template design and AJAX-enhanced click-and-drag functionality, in both case significant improvements to what Blogger (and certainly MySpace) currently offer, though WordPress and Movable Type are worth considering for this sort of thing as well.

Potential users of Squarespace include small businesses, entrepeneurs, political campaign, educators and anyone else willing to pay $7 to $17 per month, as you’ll see in this gallery of featured users.

You can learn more at Squarespace.com and see a great example of the software in action at the Modern Girls Kitchen.