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 because it encouraged players to amass huge friends lists (good heavens! they're polluting the social graph!), banned a Burger King ad campaign that let members "sacrifice" their friends to get a free cheeseburger ("Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger"), and still puts a cap of 5,000 on personal profiles' friends lists.
Last year's Oxford word of the year was the decidedly less mainstream "hypermiling."
A correction was made at 9:25 a.m. PT on November 21. It was players of PackRat, not PackRat itself, that were threatened with account suspension.
(Credit:
Grand Life NYC)
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 a co-production between the gigantic, vaguely Death Star-like 'new media holdings company' IAC/InterActiveCorp, and The Huffington Post, a progressive news hub where outraged people go in order to get more outraged before going to have dinner at Balthazar."
For those of you outside the New York tech scene, that last sentence might not make a whole lot of sense, so I'll help you out with it. Balthazar is a highbrow, red-awninged French bistro in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo, opened a decade ago by restauranteur Keith McNally, and it has a reputation for high-quality but high-priced food at all meals of the day.
If you're involved in new media in Manhattan, chances are good that you've been to Balthazar more than a few times. But at first glance, the Euro-styled place isn't particularly nerdy. The crowd at breakfast typically consists of business-hipster types in black framed glasses who walk in with copies of the International Herald-Tribune tucked under their arms, and later in the day it's a social spot for well-dressed downtowners and tourists who still have a few bucks to spend after a day of shopping in retail-friendly SoHo.
The unlikely geek cred of such a place comes from the fact that Balthazar is one of the bigger and more high-profile restaurants in a neighborhood that's pretty much saturated with Web start-ups. Within shouting distance, aside from the Huffington Post, are Gawker Media, Flavorpill, Mogulus, Thrillist, TreeHugger, Socialight, GroundReport, PSFK, Blip.tv, and probably a handful of others I'm forgetting. Consequently, Balthazar is a constant go-to place for meetings, power breakfasts, after-work libations, and what-have-you.
In fact, it's become such a ubiquitous spot for the digital-media crowd that some people are downright sick of it, opting to instead hold meetings at--the horror!--the Starbucks across the street.
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 friends who were attending that conference--Fearless Cooking video blogger Grace Piper, for example, who clarified that "steak" is e-mail you always want to read. Fellow video blog personality Bill Cammack added that "FakinBacn" would refer to e-mail that's really spam but attempts to gussy itself up in the guise of bacn. Those video podcasters are a clever crowd.
It wasn't until a conversation with digital marketing strategist Rachel Clarke at last night's first-anniversary party for gadget blog CrunchGear when it occurred to me that bacn was deserving of a spot in the lexicon of trendy tech terms. Unfortunately, BuzzFeed had already beaten me to the punch. Ouch.
So what do you think? Will this one make it to the dictionary or will it remain restricted to tongue-in-cheek use in geek circles?
(Credit:
The Diagram)
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 2005. No offense to hardcore knitters, but the "I'm going to knit because it's so ironically cool" thing just didn't float.
At the center is a sort of vortex composed of everything that's supposed to be, naturally, the new black. Click here for the big version.
(Via Information Aesthetics)
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