I hate blogs and anything to do with them, especially the terminology. Looks like I'm not alone... YES! There are other sane people in the world!
The Internet was once a wonderful place. You'd dial up, read some newsgroups, state your opinions, maybe even download some images if you were lucky. Sadly, I'm a bit too young to have properly enjoyed those days. Instead, I started using the Internet around the time the word "blog" was invented, and people began to realise that they could publish onto the net stuff that nobody gave a toss about.
Now, you may think that makes me practically a newbie to the world wide web, but sadly not. In fact, "blog" is now a ten year old word.
This information comes from Lulu, which has published results of a poll it commissioned in association with the LuLu Blooker Prize, to find the web's most irritating words.
"Blooker?" I hear you shout. "WTF is Blooker?". It's Blooker as in Booker, but for Blooks. Yes, blooks... books written from blogs. Yes, blogs... weblogs.
Amazingly, none of the aforementioned words obtained the top spot in the poll. That was saved for the skin-crawlingly repulsive term "folksonomy", which according to Lulu refers to a web classification system involving tagging. Join me in taking their word for it.
From Lulu's press release, we learn some wonderful info about some of these irritating words:
The poll of 2,000 web-users -- conducted by pollsters, YouGov.com -- marks not just the tenth birthday of the word “web-log” (born 1997), but also the fifth of the word “blook”, and the second of the Blooker Prize, first awarded 2006.
It also celebrates the entry of the word “blook” into the dictionary -- the latest (ninth) edition of the Collins English Dictionary. “It was the Blooker Prize that first brought it to our attention”, says Cormac McKeown, one of the dictionary’s editors.
These words are even getting in the flippin' dictionary for crying out loud! Still, that's enough of my unprofessional ranting. Here's the list of top ten words, from the poll:
- Folksonomy
- Blogosphere
- Blog
- Netiquette
- Blook
- Webinar
- Vlog
- Social Networking
- Cookie
- Wiki
Podcast (joint 10th)
Avatar (joint 10th)
User-generated content (joint 10th)
Life can't get much more infuriating than when reading that list now, can it?
