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After Deam Kamen introduced his scooter, “segway” became a popular misspelling for “segue”. Thirty years earlier, Thomas Pynchon used the same spelling in Gravity’s Rainbow: “But segway into the Roxbury hillside.”
37signals recently polled the customers of their online project management application and one of the questions asked what Web 2.0 meant to them. They’ve posted 500 answers to that question on their site; it’s an interesting read. I decided to do a quick and dirty analysis of the most frequently used words by the respondents, hoping that the result would provide a collective definition of sorts for the term Web 2.0. By the time I’d finished (with several timeouts and distractive blog-related detours), I went back to the thread and saw that Jacob Kaplan-Moss had already completed an analysis. Here are his top 15 words:
web - 348
ajax - 107
applications - 93
new - 78
user - 71
apps - 44
desktop - 40
sites - 37
people - 36
internet - 36
content - 34
think - 33
software - 31
services - 30
technologies - 29
Just for kicks, here’s my top 30:
web: 347
ajax: 105
more: 99
applications: 92
new: 77
user: 69
use: 47
apps: 43
desktop: 39
sites: 38
internet: 35
people: 35
content: 33
think: 32
software: 30
using: 30
etc: 29
services: 29
next: 28
technologies: 28
interactive: 28
generation: 27
application: 25
marketing: 25
websites: 23
better: 23
social: 23
users: 22
hype: 22
buzzword: 21
interfaces: 20
For some reason (my shoddy programming skills are a likely culprit), my word counts are slightly different than Jacob’s, but they’re close. I also left in a few words that he removed but that I thought were relevant, like “more”, “use”, “using”, and “etc”. Here are a few more interesting words and their frequency counts:
community: 17
collaboration: 13
companies: 13
bubble: 10
ruby: 9
rounded: 9
gradients: 8
rails: 7
37signals: 6
tagging: 6
flickr: 5
wikis: 5
overused: 5
o’reilly: 5
hyped: 5
overhyped: 5
Not sure this provides much of a definition, but it’s fun to play around with.
Big ol’ obvious caveat: I performed a straight-up word frequency analysis which did not take into account the context of particular words (e.g. no distinction between different uses of words like “think”: “I think Web 2.0 sucks” and “Web 2.0 products make users think”), phrase frequency (“web 2.0”, “next generation”, “rounded corners”), or anything like that. This obviously limits the utility of the analysis; hence “quick and dirty”.
Update: Perhaps a better “definition” of Web 2.0 comes from the related tags at del.icio.us:
ajax
tools
web
blog
webdesign
software
design
social
programming
javascript
business
Not bad.
Update: del.icio.us did this analysis back in November 2005. (thx, maciej)
Heading into dinner last night, I believed with certainty that Finland was one of the Scandinavian countries. I rebuffed Mr. Jones’ attempts to disabuse me of that notion before dessert arrived, but it wasn’t until this morning that I checked into the matter and found that he may be correct.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune investigated the issue back in January, finding that there’s some controversy, even among the staff at the Finnish Embassy in Washington D.C.:
I called the Finnish Embassy in Washington, D.C., where press aide Mari Poyhtari started by saying Finland is part of Scandinavia, but then someone in the background disagreed and she corrected herself. The most accurate term is Fenno-Scandinavia or the Nordic countries, Poyhtari said. But, she admitted, “We always say we’re part of Scandinavia.”
The Wikipedia page on Scandinavia, the result of a vigorous discussion on the topic, indicates that there are several possible arrangements of Scandinavian countries, depending on the grouping criteria used and who you’re talking to.
So there you go, clear as mud. Probably best to avoid the issue altogether in the future by using the term Nordic instead of Scandinavian. All look same anyway.
Update: Underbelly notes that this “issue is in no way limited to Scandinavians”:
It’s the kind of muddiness you just have to expect when you consider any culture. Was Cleopatra an Egyptian? Are the Tasmanians British? What did the Byzanatines have in mind when they described themselves as “The Romans” while fighting wars against, well, Rome?
(thx, jack)
The Ling, or what the kids are (or aren’t) saying these days. “Awkward became awk, actually became actu, typical became typ, amazing became amaze and hilarious became hilar.”
How to lose the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ from your speech. Videotape yourself and practice.
List of easily mispronouncable domain names. I’ve always beeen partial to WhoRepresents.com (or whorepresents.com).
If you played soccer for Brazil, what would your name be? Mine is “Jasa”, although I like the result better if I switch my first/last names: Jasinho.
The Daily Mail, with corroboration from the Times, has some information on what Marco Materazzi said to Zinedine Zidane to provoke the latter’s career ending headbutt in the 2006 World Cup final (more info on that here). They both hired lip readers to decipher Materazzi’s dialogue before the incident and this is allegedly what he said (translated from the Italian):
Hold on, wait, that one’s not for a n***er like you.
We all know you are the son of a terrorist whore.
So just fuck off.
So it might be fair to say that Materazzi got what he deserved, as did Zidane when he got sent off. Not that two wrongs make a right. Even so, I agree with these thoughts from That’s How It Happened:
[Zidane’s] willingness to headbutt Materazzi makes him more of a hero, not less. Admittedly, since France went on to lose, he’s something of a tragic hero, but a hero none-the-less. If someone insulted my race, or my religion (if I had one), I wish I’d be as ready to attack them, no matter what the circumstances. Zidane’s action highlights for the world the fact that the racial unity of France is more important than winning the World Cup.
If the lip reader is correct in what Materazzi said, I may like Zidane even more than I did before the match. (via wikipedia)
Update: Eurosport has a statement from Materazzi:
I held his shirt for a few seconds only, he turned to me, looked at me from top to bottom with utmost arrogance (and said): “if you really want my shirt, I’ll give it to you afterwards”. I answered him with an insult.
(thx, blythe)
Update: Several UK newspapers enlisted lip readers to determine what Materazzi said and ended up with many different accounts. Lip reading + language translation = unreliable. (thx, luke)
Simplified spelling seems like one of the world’s dumbest ideas, if only because you can’t even read every other paragraph of this article. (thx, hal)
Autoantonyms are words that are the opposite of themselves. Buckle means a) to fasten or b) to come undone; give way; collapse. More examples here.
Slate’s wine columnist considers which champagne Jay-Z should drink now that he’s given up the Cristal. Taste and prestige are not the only considerations: “Take, for instance, this line from the Jay-Z hit ‘Can’t Knock the Hustle’: ‘My motto, stack rocks like Colorado/ auto off the champagne, Cristal’s by the bottle. ‘Salon’ can be substituted for ‘Cristal’ at no cost to the flow.”
Speaking of brand genericide, Heroin was actually a brand name trademarked by the Bayer drug company. (thx chris, who joked, “Can I interest you in some Heroin brand morphine substitute?”)
Harris Interactive recently released a list of products ranked by brand equity, a measure of the brand’s popularity with US consumers. Here’s the top 10:
1. Reynolds Wrap Aluminum Foil
2. Ziploc Food Bags
3. Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Candy Bars
4. Kleenex Facial Tissues
5. Clorox Bleach
6. WD-40 Spray Lubricant
7. Heinz Ketchup
8. Ziploc Containers
9. Windex Glass Cleaner
10. Campbell’s Soups
Marketing can be a double-edged sword. The companies who manufacture these products have done a fantastic job in marketing these products, so fantastic in some cases that the brand name is in danger of becoming a genericized trademark. From the list above, I routinely use Ziploc, Kleenex, WD-40, and Windex to refer to the generic versions of those products, even though we sometimes use Glad products instead of Ziploc, Puffs instead of Kleenex, or another glass cleaner instead of Windex. If the companies on this list aren’t careful, they could lose the trademarked products that they’ve worked so hard to market so successfully.
Here’s a list of American proprietary eponyms, or brand names that have fallen into general use. Some of the names on the list are so old or in such common use (escalator, popsicle) that I didn’t even know they had been brands. Two current brands I can think of that might be in danger of genericide: iPod and Google. (via rw)
List of the 25 most popular nouns (by usage) according to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary: “time, person, year, way, day, thing, man, world, life, hand, part, child, eye, woman, place, work, week, case, point, government, company, number, group, problem, fact”
Nice little profile of Language Log in the NY Times. “There is a group of very smart and very well-read people out there who like to read about language and who can put together arguments based on evidence from sources and background knowledge which is not made up or nuts.” Hey, that doesn’t sound like blogs!
When players in World Cup games are arguing with the referees and players from the other team, what language are they speaking and can they actually understand one another? “‘Any kind of fellatio comment is inevitably understood,’ says [former US player] Alexi Lalas.”
Sh*t yeah, the G** D***ed history of typographical bleeping, motherf***ers! The practice was widespread as early as the late 17th century.
The International Dialects of English Archive has a ton of mp3 files of people speaking English from all over the world. “All recordings are in English, are of native speakers, and you will find both English language dialects and English spoken in the accents of other languages.”
Where do the Brazilian soccer players get their names? I’m posting this instead of watching the rest of the US/Czech match because the US is playing like a high school team.
Tenser, said the Tensor looked a little more closely at the list of cliches from Shakespeare that I posted earlier in the week and found that (at least) 18 of the expressions have earlier citations in the OED.
New word: lexidiem, meaning “word of the day”. Lexidiem is a lexidiem.
A quick study shows that stocks of simply named companies do better than those of more complexly named companies. Even companies with pronounceable ticker symbols did better than those with unpronounceable symbols.
I’ve been keeping track of words which return a link to a dictionary definition of the word in Google. Dictionary words are those that are written but not written about, haven’t been subject to the corporate/band/blog word grab, or aren’t otherwise popular words.
germane
paucity
reticent
cantankerous
suppositious
abstruse
whinge
assiduous
surreptitious
proclivity
disparaging
sporadically
hypertrophied
pallor
acerbic
surfeit
Many of the Dictionary.com Words of the Day are probably dictionary words as well.
Colorfully intricate maps of language distributions. The Asian and African maps are quite complex. (via moon river)
List of sounds that different animals make in different languages.
Update: Bzzzpeek and Sounds of the World’s Animals both let you listen to how these different animal sounds are pronounced. (thx finn, lizette, and justine)
New coinage by Simon Willison: pokemonetise, v., “to make money by appealing to the stupid human instinct to collect dumb things”.
“Why do the letters of the alphabet occur in the particular order that they do?”
The language of the Simpsons (beyond embiggens and cromulent). “You pressed YOU, meaning me. This is incorrect. You should have pressed ME, meaning you.”
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