standardising web language

If it's one thing that makes me cringe, it's putting 'e' before words (sometimes hyphenated i.e. e-commerce, e-newsletter, e-learning). Is this really necessary? This made me think (stand back) about how people use language online and how they talk about various aspects of the Web.

e-tastic
If you break the Web into three (very broad) components of design, development and copy, all have standards that have to be adhered to, except for the latter. Design can take it's cues from centuries of art & design, and development from decades of software engineering, the language of the Web however is comprised of jargon that doesn't really mean anything. I'd argue that pre-Web language can be used to describe the intricacies of the Web - but it needs an authority (like W3C) to define the terms.

Take 'Cloud computing' for example, or 'Web 2.0', there's so much time spent defining their meanings that they ultimately become counter-productive (I'd argue). I'm not sure if/how it's possible, but, in the same way we have standards in design and development, I'd like to see standards in the language of describing aspects of the Web (any suggested reading material on this?).

Apologies for the horrific use of inverted commas ^.

barry pace dot com

My first choice for a personal domain would be barrypace.com, however as you can see it's currently occupied by a "destination for modern apparel with unmistakable style and quality", which is lovely, if a little embarrassing.

Unfortunately it gets worse when I Google myself. It's only just occured to me how violated I feel that companies have been bidding on my name as a search term, I am quite distressed.

Apologies for the poor photoshopping.

Coffee.

Image courtesy of Gemma! Since I've been on Twitter, I've noticed a trend. People *love* to talk about coffee - I mean, check this out. Does it has some sort of aspirational qualities(?). I'm sure people talk about lots of other drinks on Twitter at times, but coffee is always described with such reverence.

Please don't misinterpret this as an attack on you many coffee drinkers out there, I don't have a problem with you, it's purely an observation (which annoys me mildly). I've taken to retweeting all my coffee related tweets to share this with my followers. Thus far, it's not gone down well.

There were 89 tweets about coffee while I was writing this post.

PS.  Tea ftw.

worst christmas cracker gift ever?

googleworld(ish)

Interesting debate on Tuesday at the ICA with Andrew Keen and Randall Stross, with Bill Thompson moderating. Most importantly for me, it provoked me to think of how people's approaches to discourse on the Web are heavily influenced by their background in previous areas (mainly due to the variety of questions from the audience).

So on a huge tangent from the Googleworld debate - It's clear that understanding how the Web has impacted our lives, especially over the last 10 years requires knowledge across a broad range of disciplines. For me, there is nothing currently in the education system which supplies the correct type of candidate (for want of a better phrase) for working on Web theory as such. A combination of technical and sociological awareness, which, as the current education system has it, are almost polar-opposites.

We're now seeing introduction of high level research, attempting to engineer the Web's future and ensure it's social benefit is maximised. And more recently, the introduction this year of the World Wide Web foundation with specific courses. Encouraging though it is, I feel there needs to be a more grassroots approach to education for Web theory (or Web Science as it's being called).

I wonder how long it will be before we see such studies introduced at a more basic curricular level? I certainly think it's necessary a younger generation are made more aware of the potentialities of the Web's huge information meta-structure, not just the potential for Bebo and porn.