Pete Ashton (a fine brummie blogger) pointed me to a wonderful post from George Dvorsky on Must Know Terms for the 21st Century Intellectual.
The list has some gems, from the increasingly familiar Moore’s Law and Open Source through to Noosphere, the freakily possible Participatory Panopticon and the onrush of the Technological Singularity.
I consider most of this language to be downright rude. They are what I call “home words”: the ones you can get away with only in ‘private’. It’s the sort of language which convinces others that a normal human has become a techno-evangelist (oops), at best a geek, at worst a raving lunatic and certainly to be avoided. So in the world of charities and the internet which are out ‘home words’? What will alienate rather than stimulate?
Here are my five starters…
nptech (tags don’t belong in the real world)
vlogcast (unh?)
blogosphere (we want them to join it, not run screaming)
user generated content (worse ugc)
trackback
Please add yours. Trackback if you like, perhaps even tag them homewords.
January 24th, 2007 at 12:31 pm (#)
Home truths about technobabble and social media…
A few weeks back I was getting a bit over-lyrical with a group of friends about the world-changing potential of blogs and other social media, and the buzz from conversations with other enthusiasts around the globe. Words like feeds, tagging,…
January 27th, 2007 at 7:43 pm (#)
[...] Beth Kanter of the Sharing Foundation explains how they used the internet to raise $100,000 for children in Cambodia. I’be known beth through blogging for a few moneths now but met her in Bimringham ealrier this month. She is an expert on the internet and non-profit organisations and in this podcast she talks about how you can combine tools such as widgets with the power of your networks, whether real or virtual, to encourage people to give money to support to your cause. She also writes about how they raised the money here on her blog. To listen scroll to the end of this (literally) lengthy post or download the mp3 here. This also represents a bit of a first for the Grassroots Channel because we have figured out how to add documents to our podcast feed – pdfcasting? (ouch). So with this comes a beginners guide to online fundraising written as one of a series of briefing we have done for the Birmingham Community Empowerment Network. It is aimed at groups who are not charities and offers basic tips on how to raise funds using the internet through doate button, selling and buying online. if you’ve never used the net in this way before this is the guide for you! In the podcast Beth talks about widgets, so I thought I would show you what she means. This one is for Kate Chapman, a friend of mine who will soon be running to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer Care. [...]