Net Results:A new survey has confirmed what I have always known - people detest the word "blog". Blog is short for the word "weblog", which is better, but used less and less as the truncated "blog" has taken over, writes Karlin Lillington.
In a survey on most hated net terms people (again, rightly!) despised the word "blogosphere" - the extremely annoying word used to describe the blogging community - even more. Also right up there were "netiquette", "wiki" and "cookie" (hate those too).
"Podcast" and "avatar" grate, as do "webinar" (a seminar conducted over the web) and "vlog" (a video blog).
Top of the list comes a term I had never even heard of until now, indicating (to my secret relief) that maybe I don't spend way too much online after all: "folksonomy", which is apparently "a term for a web classification system". I feel your pain.
These wince-inducing terms were compiled from a survey of about 2,000 adults by a research company in Britain called YouGov on behalf of the Lulu Blooker Prize, an award given to the best blog turned into a book.
I take consolation from the fact that responders listed "blook" as one of the top 10 internet terms they most detest, too. That is what I call poetic, or at least literary, justice.
However it doesn't make up for the fact that the internet spawns such appalling terms or that they unfortunately do not go away.
You would think that after their initial invention by some overexcited geek (I mean, "blog"? Give me a break) or illiterate marketing hack (only the latter could think up "webinar"), these terms, regarded with unrelenting ridicule, would vanish into some lexical dustbin.
But no. Somehow, they gain currency and stick around like something distasteful on the bottom of a shoe. In doing so, they make many of us who love the web feel slightly ashamed of inhabiting on a regular basis a virtual world where grownups use a word like "wiki".
That said, I have always kind of liked the term "podcast" - and if you don't, at least you know who to blame - a British journalist and blogger named Ben Hammersley.
I find "podcast" a nice combination of apt and amusing - it is what it says and is a funny little play on "broadcast". It also used to be a hip little term passed around by a tiny number of bloggers (Ben of course used the term now and then on his weblog, www.benhammersley.com) for a minority activity that people started doing because it was kind of fun and kind of cool.
Then it percolated through the - yes - blogosphere, the entire world caught on and the rest is history (or at least, an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary).
Everyone seems to podcast now, from RTÉ to that annoying kid you sat next to in school. Even the church is in on the podcast act - although it refers to these as, brace yourself, "godcasts" - a word that just entered the Collins English Dictionary.
What is this thing with dictionaries, though? Frankly, I hate how quickly some of these terms that push right-thinking people to the brink of despair gain validation in this way.
Surely, if we just ignored "blog" or "webinar" a little bit longer, if we didn't pay them any attention as they pranced about in the corner gurning and throwing spitballs and trying to attract attention to themselves (as your teachers used to say), they'd eventually go away.
I can't help but think that dictionaries, in a sad attempt to be "relevant" and "with it", rush in like the oldest swinger in town where normal, intelligent people fear to tread.
Collins, which is well known for getting slang into print first, is the arbiter of unfortunate trends in this way, inflicting words that never should have been born on to us for all eternity.
"We are hip with the kids!" they seem to want to say. "We know all about Bebo and FaceBook and we've googled with the best of them! Go tell the blogosphere about our hipness in adding 'godcast' and 'me-media'!"
You know what comes next: the official Collins dictionary webinars on blogosphere netiquette and net neologisms. Or maybe they'll just do a podcast for the me-media crowd.
blog: www.techno-culture.com
