Udhay Shankar N wrote [at 01:15 PM 6/25/2007] :
http://www.techtree.com/India/News/The_Webs_Ten_Most_Irritating_Words/551-81821-643.html
The Web's Ten Most Irritating Words
Techtree News Staff Email Print
Jun 24, 2007
Can you believe that the World Wide Web has actually spawned words
that might make users want to pull at their hair in frustration?
Interesting - it appears I've been (along with various others) gamed.
The whole survey was a plant - i.e., fake from the beginning.
Udhay
http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/06/making-the-news.html
Making the News
June 25, 2007
The gist: A lighthearted unscientific poll that was created as a PR
ploy for a tech company is quickly evolving into a "real" news story,
being treated as fact by mainstream press. That evolution from
marketing effort to established fact can have real impact on people
who works in related fields. This phenomenon is worth examining
because, while this fairly harmless example hasn't resulted in a lot
of drama, it shows the pattern that underlies a lot of the drama that
tends to pop up in web communities.
First, to begin with the disclaimers, I know a lot of the people
involved in this story, either as acquaintances in the tech industry,
or socially by running into them at various events. Second, I don't
think anybody's done anything egregiously wrong here, I just think
the end result is interesting, insightful and a little scary.
Here's the story: Last week, I got an unsolicited press release and
pitch from a PR company that has sent me announcements for a few
years. I get a lot of these pitches, though I never blog about them,
and this particular PR company is fairly respectful so I don't mind
much. (I'll omit mention of the PR company, though they're fairly
easy to find if you're interested.)
Towards the beginning of the announcement was the following:
"Folksonomy" has been voted the word most likely to make
web-users "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the key-board"
-- in a poll to mark the tenth birthday of the word "weblog" by
finding the single most irksome new word to have been spawned by the Internet.
Folksonomy (a web classification system) out-pointed words
including "blog" (an online journal), "blogosphere" (the collective
name for all blogs), "netiquette" (Internet etiquette) and "webinar"
(a web seminar) -- in a poll commissioned by the Lulu Blooker Prize
(www.lulublookerprize.com), the world's first literary prize for
"blooks", alias books based on blogs.
A folksonomy -- a hybrid of "folks" and "taxonomy" -- is a
system for classifying web content by tagging key words.
The press release was a fairly straightforward pitch for Lulu, one of
the more popular services for printing books on demand. They were
pretty clearly trying to get the word "blook" to be named one of the
most annoying web words, as an oblique promo for their sponsorship of
the "Blooker" prize. ("Blooker", of course, is itself a take on the
Booker Prize.)
The poll mentioned in the pitch was run by YouGov in the U.K., though
I could find no mention of their methodology. As has been noted by
prominent bloggers like Jason Kottke, the press release and poll were
picked up by some mainstream news organizations, first starting with
second-tier small-town papers and moving up to established outlets
like Entrepreneur, Salon, and the Seattle Times, as you can see in a
Google News search.
Now, when I got the email, the first person I thought of was Thomas
Vander Wal, who's a friend of mine and whom I'd just been hanging out
with at a conference earlier last week. Thomas coined the word
"folksonomy" (see his history of the word's origin) and has some part
of his professional identity associated with the word.
Fortunately, Thomas' career is far too well-established to really be
negatively affected by someone saying a word he created is annoying.
In fact, I'm sure Thomas has considered "folksonomy" to be somewhat
annoying from time to time himself. But instead of coining a phrase,
he could easily have made a product or service that was being
maligned in passing as part of a company's promotional efforts. And
that potential is what makes this story interesting. I emailed Thomas
late last week to get his opinions on the press release and its
migration to mainstream media outlets.
I have seen a few variations of this and yet to see any actual
source, until you pointed this press release. I was amazed that 2,000
people in Britain knew of the word and knew it well enough to hate
it, but the poll being British has only been in 2/3rds of the "news"
articles I read. I was not surprised with the term folksonomy being
hated as most people read the continually bad overview of the term on
Wikipedia (after pushing from academics I finally posted the concise
definition and story about the creation of the term -
http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html - as they were tired of being
corrected that their understanding of folksonomy was wrong).
The remarkable thing here is, I don't think YouGov would present
their poll as anything other than simple entertainment -- they don't
pretend to be scientifically valid. Even those who published the poll
would probably not assert that the trumpeted headline represents
actual facts. But through sheer force of repetition, and gradual
amplification from a PR pitch to a few blog posts and second-tier
media outlets, all the way up to reputable media outlets, this little
nugget of information has already graduated to a semblance of
truthiness. Those of us who have the misfortune to spend too much
time at web technology industry events will undoubtedly be hearing
someone say "this is the most annoying word on the web" in reference
to a PowerPoint slide about folksonomy at some point in the near
future. Like the false stories that Al Gore claimed to have invented
the Internet, uncritical repetition by media outlets and the idea's
convenience as a shorthand punchline will work together to subvert fact.
In this case, the result's kinda harmless. One guy's pet word is
kinda tarnished, and I'm sure when Thomas's upcoming book is
released, half of the people he talks in promoting it will ask him
stupid questions about whether the word is annoying. That's not so
bad. Lulu might have gotten a little bit of press out of this, but
most of the mentions only plug the poll results and mention the
company in passing, which isn't exactly a slam-dunk.
The most damning thing here is the fact that these media outlets,
many of which do have blogs already and have embraced social media,
are still in the habit of repeating poorly-sourced unscientific polls
as if they accurately reflect societal trends. And often, the end
result isn't merely a harmless annoyance for one person, it's the
perpetuation of a falsehood that can affect the careers or efforts of
people or entire organizations. It's the kind of thing that can make
you "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the key-board".
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
