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Internet Euphemisms Decoded

July

3rd

Christine Huang

BoingBoing recently found itself in a public tiff with one of their former writers, Violet Blue, after the website’s editors decided to delete every one of her posts with no identifiable reason. BoingBoing insisted that they hadn’t censored their ex-blogger, but rather just ‘unpublished’ all of her work.

In response, Gawker has posted a funny if characteristically snarky post clarifying some of that obfuscating language (such as ‘unpublished’) being thrown around by all of us in the blogosphere when we’re trying to cover up what’s really going on (or what we really mean). Some highlights:

- Brand advertising = Bad clickthroughs. “We have a clickthrough rate of one in ten thousand, but we’re more of a brand destination.”

- Update: Fix. On a blog or in a program, an update means something was broken.

- Experimental: Failed. Everyone secretly hopes their projects take off, so they can say “Oh, it was just a fun little project!” More often, the project gets just the attention it deserved: none.

- Platform: Vague idea. Instead of a useful tool, a tool for other people to make useful tools. Possibly a cash cow, but boring. (For a geekier set, a platform is for those too lazy to code; an API is for those too lazy to write a platform.)

- Beta: Broken. For some web services, “beta” is as regular as PMS until Google buys the company.

- Viral: Cheap. Of course, sometimes that’s the kind of ad a brand deserves. Note which brand was faster to jump on viral videos: Not Coke, but Mentos.

- Contextual advertising: Bottom-of-the-barrel ads. What’s left over after “brand advertising” and served with “user-generated” content.