Most Hated Words

Godzilla speaks

“Teh internetz” are not always the best friend of the English language. Not that I subscribe to the idea that all this chatting on forums is ruining the kids’ ability to use language – after all, a language is a living thing, and should be, needs to be, remoulded, reworked, and re-engergised on a daily basis – but the IT world throws up some really ugly words, just plain minging arrangements of letters that should never be displayed on screen, let alone spoken out loud.

Nate Anderson at Ars Technica has a brief post up about a YouGov survey of the most annoying words spawned by the web. These include folksonomy, vlog and webinar. Nate adds a few of his own linguistic nails-on-a-blackboard moments – including the terrible ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘AJAXify’ (although I’d disagree with his inclusion of ‘podcast’.

There are a few words that are regularly used to pepper press releases for hardware products, and have the same effects as seasoning your chile con carne with horse manure. Here are the terms that deserve to be publicly shamed like a first-round failure on X-Factor:

1. Solutions.

As in… “AMD continues to deliver technology solutions that improve the way we live, work and play.”

No. Solutions don’t improve things, they solve problems. ‘4’ is the solution to 2+2. Ordering a pizza when you’ve got no food in the house and everyone is starving. These are solutions, because they address direct, easily quantifiable problems.

2. Platform.

As in… “Creative is now driving digital entertainment on the PC platform with products like its highly acclaimed ZEN™ portable audio and media players.”

Nope. A platform is a place which trains arrive late to. Why even use the word ‘platform’ here?

3. Extreme.

As in… “NVIDIA’s GigaThread Technology, which, through the use of a massively multi-threaded architecture, is able to create thousands of independent, simultaneous threads, providing extreme processing efficiency for advanced, next generation shader programs.”

Nein. Forty degrees below zero. Fans of Adolf Hitler. Stoning people to death for stealing. These are extreme.

But the worst offender has to be…

4. Functionality.

As in… “Consumers today are demanding higher standards of digital entertainment experiences that enhance the very personal environments of their home,” said Satjiv S. Chahil, senior vice president, global marketing, Personal Systems Group, HP. “HP designers have achieved a much needed balance of form and functionality that enriches the experience and ease of use of today’s personal technology.”

What’s wrong with ‘function(s)’? If adding -ality to a word automatically added 30% more professionalism and excitment to something, I’d work for a publication called Custom PCality. You’d be searching the web with Googleality and enthusing about your iPod and its iTunesality. But it’s not, and you don’t. People, let’s end the -ality now.

The iPhone: Apple’s best defence

iPhone

A friend of mine works as a news journalist for PA out in New York, and as Apple’s iPhone is due for launch very soon, he’s writing a story and asked me for some thoughts on it.

It’s always interesting to help out with someone’s research, as it gives you an opportunity to give some order to your own thoughts.

I think that Apple seems to be in a very strong position at the moment – but the interesting thing is that it’s not necessarily a secure one, and this is where the iPhone comes in. More and more people are listening to digital music on their mobile phones, and as the phones get better in terms of functions and storage, this will happen in greater numbers, and it will erode the market for an iPod. Sony Ericsson has been very aggressive with this, using the Sony Walkman brand for its phones. The mobile phone networks also now offer music downloads straight to the phone, which the iPod, forever tethered to a PC or Mac’s iTunes, doesn’t currently offer. The simplicity of just having one device to carry, rather than both a phone and an iPod also appeals to people. The iPhone has full iPod features, so it’s a good way to counter this trend.

Secondly, it’s now a lot easier to do a lot more online, and the web doesn’t care what computer – PC or Mac – that it’s running on, which threaten Apple’s computer business, as does the fact that more and more people are using their phones to access the web. So, naturally, the iPhone is being pushed as being great for mobile internet, and again, it’s making sure that Apple is keeping abreast of changes in the way people use technology, the way it fits into their lives, and also, has a product to offer them.

While Apple is pushing the iPhone as a revolutionary device, it’s actually a typical Apple product in that it’s being launched into an existing, but fairly obscure/geeky market, and it will try and make it more popular. Microsoft, after all, has been releasing versions of its Windows Mobile software since the year 2000.

In order for the iPhone to be a good iPod, and a good mobile web device, Apple will have made trade offs, just as they did with the iPod, and the screen is the biggest area where you can see this. The iPhone’s touchscreen is going to be great for scrolling through songs, images and web pages, and of course it frees up space to have a massive display. It’s probably not going to be so good for entering text or numbers though, but I think Apple has decided these aren’t of primary importance – after all, most people store all their numbers in the address book, and with the iPod and internet functions being so important, the control system has to be perfect for them.

The question of whether the iPhone is a success for the Apple as a company isn’t going to be answered for a while – but regardless of how well it actually does, I think the iPhone will end up being a transitional product: if it flops, Apple will stick to computers and iPods and home media stuff. If it succeeds then you can bet there will be a lot more ultra mini computers on the way. The iPhone is just a test.

Continue reading “The iPhone: Apple’s best defence”

An old school journalist does new media

CPC video

As I mentioned in my previous post about heading off to Computex with a bag weighed down with AV kit, at work, we’re really pushing on with expanding what we, technically a bunch of magazine journalists, do. When I joined, close to four years ago, I wrote articles for a magazine. In the past year, this has been expanded to include podcasting, shooting photos for web and magazine stories, and now, shooting video! Footage from the Computex trade show of some overclocking with liquid nitrogen is very neatly embedded in this news story here.

There are many decent blogs on the web that deal with the way journalism is changing: I’ve got RSS subscriptions to the fabulous Journerdism, Invisible Inkling, Publishing 2.0 and Wordblog to name just a few. It helps me keep up with what’s going on, and gives me a lot of valuable stuff to think about in terms of how my career field is changing. These sites are great and tend to avoid the position about journalism that is extremely common around the web: the assumption that pretty much anyone who writes for a print product doesn’t get the web, and doesn’t want to.

Now, this is probably true for some journalists, but most of the journalists I know can’t wait to get their hands on video recorders, cameras and decent CMS systems. I think the reason the opinion that journos hate the web is so widely held is that it appears to be true on a much wider scale, because so few major print brands have good websites. It’s a quick judgement, but an easy one to simply say – bad website = people who don’t care about the web.

However, it’s usually not the journalists – the writers – who make these websites. And being a blogger, when you want to change something, you just log in, and apply a different theme, or add a widget, or write a post. It’s great. I know, I love TypePad for that.

Can’t do it at work so easily, though – print brands (like Custom PC) are owned by large companies, large, multi-department companies that devolve control of stuff to many different teams, and when it comes to something new like the web, the structure is not all that well defined, especially in terms of who does what.

Dennis, where I work, has spent the last year trying to improve how the existing teams on the print and web side can mesh together. We are getting there, I think. For instance, my job title has just changed, so that I now have a role description that budgets 50% of my time for print stuff, and 50% for web stuff – before, if I wanted to work on web projects (like, say, the podcast), I had to find the time while doing a job that had no time allocated for non-magazine work. I still did it though, becuase I really thought it would be fun and great for us to do a podcast. Rex Sorgatz puts it perfectly in this interview:

“Big Media Is Hard. Epitaph or bumper sticker? I’m not sure, but it’s so true. Building
small little sites is so rewarding because you can build an entire new
universe in a month. But getting a big media company to change
directions is ridiculously frustrating. Big media is hard! But big
media is also influential, interesting, powerful, gargantuan,
mysterious — in a word, exciting. So my little dream right now is to
create a “small media mentality” within “big media company.”

I’m with him on both sides; that it’s hard to change, but when it does change, the opportunities are massive. The truly new CPC site is coming and it will be great, I think. I hope.

On jetlag and moving generally

From the top of 101

I wonder what it is that causes jetlag – the distance? the effort and energy of the travelling? the fact you pass from the real world into the strangeness of airports and planes and duty free shopping at midnight? being separated, so viscerally, from home and all its rhythms? or is it just all to do with the ropey food on the plane?

I am back from Taiwan now; the Computex trade show itself was excellent, and we put some good coverage onto the CPC site. Still the old site, as the dev team missed the deadline for getting the new one ready, which was… frustrating. I am also in the middle of moving, as the Jesteress and I have moved out of our rented flat in North London, and have a week before we can move into the new house in South London. So we’re staying with friends, and with all the running around, boxes, packing, lifting, moving and different routine, in a way, I feel like I am jetlagged again. We did have a huge amount of help from friends when it came to moving all our stuff to the new house, which was brilliant – it’s lovely to be surrounded by enthusiastic people! Especially when they’re all so good at carrying things 🙂 So I’m really looking forward to the new place now. Just need to wait for the workmen to finish de-damping the place.

And in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy being in the meantime.

[Photo: Taipei from the observation deck of Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building]

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