Not to be outdone by my Portland Portal, electricstate.com (aka, this site) has been redesigned to look like more of a traditional blog. The emphasis is on readability.

• Bio/links are easily available

• Site searching and browsing can be easily accomplished

• Font size and leading should make reading my entries easier.

• You can get in touch with me through my LinkedIn profile and Meebo sidebar. Yeah, I’m hip to the web 2.0, kidz.

Oh, and some posts – ones I deem worthy – will be following by a plethora of icons. Using these icons, you can submit these aforementioned posts to sites like digg and reddit. Let’s get viral!

I thought I’d take a momentary break from my busy workday, to bring the following atrocity to your attention.

This is an advertisement I noticed on MySpace (I know, I know – first mistake)

Look closely.

Wow. Nice school. Maybe while I’m studying for my Managment degree, I’ll take a few classes in Bialogy or Educashun.

As many tech-savvy folks know (most of you, I’m sure), Apple recently released an iPod with video capabilities. The practicality of video on the go notwithstanding, I think the most interesting part of that announcement was that they’d be offering television shows up for download, ala cart, along with full seasons, if you wanted to download them. This is very cool, and I hope it continues to mature. However, this has angered some network affiliates, who are worried that will people will download the shows they want to see, and no longer turn on local television.

One affiliate, however, has taken some forward-thinking steps to combat this:

ABC Affiliates Start ‘Vidcasting’ News Broadcasts

So, am I angry at the affiliate, for some reason? No.

I’m angry at the word “vidcast,” which I find profoundly stupid, and indicative of a larger trend with which I’m sure you’ll all be familiar. There is currently this need, which I see primarily in the web industry, but is probably manifested elsewhere, to reinvent that which doesn’t need reinvention, and to use new language to do it. I know that one of the best parts of English is its malleability (woohoo!), and the fact that it can be refined and honed to properly express new ideas as they materialize. This is fine in certain cases. Hypertext becomes the web, a web page becomes a web site, etc… And you know what? I’m even okay with the word “blog” representing any kind of a website with either an article/link focus, typically published in reverse chronological order, with comments enabled (although it could certainly be argued that that definition is starting to lose its utility).

However, there are some things that I’m just not ok with, and this story was the one that broke the camel’s back.

AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.: Cute, but misses the point that it’s really not about XML at all, beyond the fact that XML (along with plain text, if desired) can be returned, and that the name of the object used in JavaScript to facilitate this transfer is the XMLHttpRequest (which should, really, be simply called HTMLRequest). This should really be termed “remoting with JavaScript”, or JavaScript remoting. I guess “JeMo” isn’t as sexy as AJAX (although it’d probably make a kickass musical genre). Of course, flash has had this for awhile now, but I guess Flax isn’t as cool as AJAX, either.

Podcasting – Points for coining this word at the exact right time. It still seems to me mostly like a solution in need of a problem. Oh, and I liked it better when it was just referred to as timeshifting.

Screencasting – Yeah, this is a movie of your computer screen. It isn’t cool.

Vidcasting – Huh? VIDCASTING?! You mean, like displaying VIDEO to USERS on the WEB? Maybe if I download these videos with broadband, I can refer to the whole movement as BROADCASTING, and we can step away from the brink.

Mashup – Ok, this isn’t about the web, but I still hate the term.

Web 2.0 – Look. I’ve been making websites for about nine years. I’ve been making interactive web apps for five. I’ve been using techniques like hidden iframes, and advanced JavaScript for four. So don’t tell me that we’re just now being ushered into some sort of glorious panacea with draggable DIVs, opacity and remoting. Some of us have already been here. (However, mad props to Scriptaculous, which is indeed a very cool JavaScript library, the prototype library, and to Ruby on Rails, for grouping web zealots into one easily ignorable set, in a way that hasn’t been done since GNU/Linux started picking up steam.)

So is this just sour grapes? Am I just another web developer who, having used all these technologies for years in quiet obscurity finds it irritating to have my skillset renamed by a bunch of posers?

Yes. That’s pretty much what it is. It is a rant, after all.

Oh, and incidentally, I’ve submitted this as a news story to digg.com – I have subdigged it, you might say – and will later record myself reading this blog entry, in preparation for a first-ever blogcast/podcast, a term to which I will refer as a podblogcast. If this takes off, all websites dealing with blogs recorded exactly as written will no longer be referred to as websites, or even blogs or audioblogs – they will be podblogs, or pooblogs for short (in spite of the fact that this does not shorten the word at all.)

Ok, now that that’s over – does anyone has any terminology to add?

I was 13, and a partner and I had made it, deep into the LEST Spelling tournament. LEST stands for Lutheran Elementary Schools Tournament – I’m attempting to come up with some sort of sordid or distasteful acronym that would also be suitable, but am drawing a blank. Anyway, there were only two other two-person teams left, and us: Team Trinity Lutheran, comprised of me, a gregarious fat kid with a talent for spelling, and a friend, who was one of those simultaneously cool, simultaneously nerdy kids who wouldn’t really recognize that as an asset until later.

While this obviously isn’t the national spelling bee, in which bedraggled children completely devoid of social skills commit to memory thousands of words foreign even to those who study for the GRE, we’d weathered some difficult words. Imagine our surprise and delight when the next word was called: “Please spell ‘misspell’”

We looked at each other, relief probably palpable, but then shadows of doubt began to creep across our prepubescant visages: misspell? Who spells misspell? Miss-pell? Mi-spell ? Mis-spell? Well, the answer is the last word in the list, and it seems terribly obvious to me now, but it was either nerves or a combination of spelling words for hours on end, but we blurted out “mispell.”

We lost.

My father hit the bottle that night. My friend killed himself. Ok, he didn’t really, and my father didn’t drink due to our mistake, either. But it still stunk to have to tell people you knew that, yes, we had been tossed out of a spelling competition because we misspelled mispell. Er, wait. We mispelled misspell. Aw, fuck it.

Screw you, misspell.