Conversations Over the Wall
Many of our oddest, most enlightening and depressing moments occur in our conversations over the wall. They typically start with "So I've got a guy..." or "Has anybody seen...". This is the real heart of our support centre. Sometimes, we talk about things other than work.
Let us recall a time when we discussed the use and abuse of the malformed word, blog. Short for weblog, which literally means a log on the web. Since the participants of these conversations are all techies, the concept of logs take on a very special meaning. They are records of a myriad of standard, formatted outputs generated by applications/services/device drivers used for debugging and information purposes. Clearly, this does not apply to blogs as they rarely serve as method of debugging and even more rarely are they informative. They're certainly not written in a standard formatted output.
So, in an attempt properly classify and rename "blogs", it was put forth that they should be called by what they are; remotely hosted online journals. This accurately describes what happens here on blogspot as journals are far more free form and given to flights of fancy. Of course, calling them remote hosted online journals is somewhat cumbersome and quite frankly wouldn't sell with that name. Instead, the name could be shortened to urnals. This is much easier to say, and maintains a fairly accurate description of the product.
And they say marketing is hard.
Let us recall a time when we discussed the use and abuse of the malformed word, blog. Short for weblog, which literally means a log on the web. Since the participants of these conversations are all techies, the concept of logs take on a very special meaning. They are records of a myriad of standard, formatted outputs generated by applications/services/device drivers used for debugging and information purposes. Clearly, this does not apply to blogs as they rarely serve as method of debugging and even more rarely are they informative. They're certainly not written in a standard formatted output.
So, in an attempt properly classify and rename "blogs", it was put forth that they should be called by what they are; remotely hosted online journals. This accurately describes what happens here on blogspot as journals are far more free form and given to flights of fancy. Of course, calling them remote hosted online journals is somewhat cumbersome and quite frankly wouldn't sell with that name. Instead, the name could be shortened to urnals. This is much easier to say, and maintains a fairly accurate description of the product.
And they say marketing is hard.
posted by Serdic at 21:26
3 Comments:
If the name is being shortened to "urnals" I propose it be formatted as URnaLs, to honour the Internet-based nature of URnaLs which are referenced using a Uniform Resource Locator. Think back to the early days of HoTMaiL.
This conversation clearly didn't happen when I was there. Unless it was when I was laying on the floor. I would have taken issue with the "remote hosted" part, because it makes a statement that is not necessarily always true. As an example, my URnaL was once locally hosted. Calling it a hosted, online journal would be valid, but if it's online the hosted adjective can be taken as given. This leaves us with simply "online journal", and I hardly think that we can claim to have created that term.
We can claim?
That's a pretty liberal use of the word 'we', mister missed-the-conversation, passed-out-on-the-floor.
I like to feel included.
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