Mashable reports that the word "Twilf" has entered Twitter Vernacular thanks to an episode of Current's Super News. In the cartoon Sarah Palin is referred to as a Twilf. The word has a more wholesome meaning then you might think. The Urban Dictionary says Twilf is a "Tweep I'd like to follow." The problem with Sarah Palin being a Twilf is she hasn't been twittering lately. Here is the crazy Current cartoon where the word twilf comes up.
Oxford University Press Monitoring the Blogosphere for New Words
A short entry on OxfordMail.net says the Oxford University Press is searching the blogosphere to find new words.
Staff at Oxford University Press have started monitoring the use of English in web logs to find new words.
Lexicographers responsible for updating the Oxford English Corpus, which provides the basis for its dictionaries, will trawl through some 70 million 'blogs' in their search.
And with 120,000 new ones created every day, they may be in for quite a search.
A Guardian books blog post also discusses the decision by the Oxford University Press (OUP) to monitor "the use of English in weblogs." They also provide this recently published list from OUP of the 15 most frequently blogged words.
15 Most Frequently Blogged Words
blogger
blog
stupid
me
myself
my
oh
yeah
ok
post
stuff
lovely
update
nice
shit
These words don't exactly make us bloggers sound like masters of prose. In addition to scouring the blogosphere for new words the Oxford University Press also has a blog of its very own.
The AFP reports that words like blog, wiki, blogosphere and folksonomy have topped a recent poll of hated Internet words. Folksonomy was found to the most irritating web word of them all.
"Blog", "netiquette", "cookie" and "wiki" have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll published Thursday.
Topping the list of words most likely to make web users "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard" was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.
"Blogosphere", the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; "blog" itself was third; "netiquette", or Internet etiquette, came fourth and "blook", a book based on a blog, was fifth.
"Cookie", a file sent to a user's computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while "wiki", a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth.
Folksonomy is an irritating web word but it is used more often than you might think. Folksonomy has over 11 million results on Google.
Google Allows Advertisers to Target Specific Blogs and Websites
The New York Times is reporting that Google plans to let Adwords advertisers target the blogs and websites they want to advertise on even if the blog or site is not relevant. The Times gives an example where a motor oil company could advertise on a wine site if it outbids the other advertisers. This is a significant change for Google and it is is probably bad news for blogs with small traffic if ad buyers choose to target only sites they are familiar with -- not that Adwords worked well for small blogs anyway. And what happens to the theory of the long tail if advertisers only want to place ads on the very top of the tail? John Battelle, author of The Search and the Searchblog told the Times that the Adwords changes mean Google is no longer a search company.
"The core philosophy of Google's advertising business is that these ads are actually valuable and useful to users: look for Chevy trucks and get Chevy truck ads," he said. "Now we are in another place. It's more about branding and more about advertising other things than what you are looking for, and, cynically, it may be about being a public company that needs revenue growth."
While small blogs and sites may be made less important by the Adwords change large blogs and sites may have reasons to be concerned as well. Christopher M. Schroeder, the chief executive of Choice Media, told the Times:
"If you are a big publisher," Mr. Schroeder said, "this concerns you, because at the end of the day nothing is more important than your relationship with marketers and your ability to control your own ad inventory."
