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Oxford's word of the year? 'Unfriend'

Perhaps in a sign of how the plague of social media has numbed us all to the value of legitimate human connections, the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the verb "unfriend," or "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook," as its 2009 Word of the Year.

At the very least, it's a testament to the ubiquity of Facebook, which now has well over 300 million members around the world.

Facebook itself takes the process of "friending" and "unfriending" very seriously. It once sent warning notes to players of a third-party game called PackRat … Read more

Gotham Geek Guidebook: Balthazar

Left-leaning news hub The Huffington Post launched a new blog on Thursday, one that's been talked up quite a bit among the New York new media scene. It's called "236.com"--that's 23/6, which could be considered the 24/7 of the liberal leisure class that reads HuffPo blogs in the first place. (For the record, the main 236.com domain, which will include more print and multimedia content, has not yet launched.)

Anyway, in describing itself to curious visitors, a blurb at the top of the new blog explains: "236.com is … Read more

Trendy Terminology: Bacn

Despite the obligatory missing vowel, bacn (pronounced "bacon") isn't a hot Web 2.0 start-up. It's "the middle class of e-mail," the stuff that isn't really spam because it's not totally unwanted, but isn't really wanted either. Case in point: Pownce messages, Facebook friend requests, Amazon "recommendations."

Unlike many dorky tech terms, the origins of bacn aren't especially apocryphal; we've got a real (electronic) paper trail. The term arose during a discussion at Podcamp2 Pittsburgh earlier in August and slipped onto my radar via Twitter feeds from … Read more

Can Mondays be the new Fridays?

Here's an infographic map from thediagram.com that charts any number of occurrences of the ubiquitous marketing buzz phrase "is the new" from throughout the year 2005.

Among them: South Korea is the new Hong Kong, nepotism is the new polio, Samsung is the new Sony, RSS is the new WWW, Karl Lagerfeld is the new Steve Jobs, and cocoa is the new red wine. (No, it isn't.) Tuesday is the new Thursday, but everybody knew that already. And knitting is apparently the new rock 'n roll, a trend which thankfully appears to have disappeared with … Read more