Hey,
I have a friend who needs your help.... They are developing a project that would, if funded, allow them to read blogs for a living... at least for a while :). Sounds cool, no?
I think I understand their project well enough to ask for your help in gathering examples. They aren't really interested in newly created words for blogs, or new uses of punctuation (it seems they've been studied to death, who knew?) -- but rather ways in which bloggerss put old words together in new ways or the way that bloggers give new definitions to old words.
One example of the kind of thing they are looking for is the blogging world's construction of the phrase of "random bullets of crap"... or the way bloggers and blog comment-writers use "here" to refer to a blog... as in "she commented here that ________".
So, if you could help out my brilliant buddy, we'd both be grateful.... you can help by leaving your thoughts in comments here (they'll read etc..). If you think it would help to ask the question on your blog, you can let my buddy know what you are up to by leaving a comment.
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6 comments:
hmm...along the lines of the "here," we "put up" and "take down" posts. and blogs, too. we post things "to" the blog. I'm sure I've heard people talk about taking the whole blog down, too. Down from where, exactly? from being...uploaded? I guess.
i'll think about this more on behalf of your brilliant friend :)
If it helps, I'm the one who first ever used "Random Bullets of Crap". Actually, going back in the archives I see that I first called it Bullets of Random Crap, but somehow it got morphed so that even I switched the order. I used to do one every month, until I just started doing it whenever I felt like it.
I'm glad Ianqui popped in - I wanted to make sure she got credit for RBOC, because that's one of the most widely adopted coined words I've seen in the blogosphere! I'm also fond of "blog posse," for that group of supportive friends most writers accumulate.
Oh, man. The metaphorical uses of spatial prepositional phrases are ubiquitous. E.g., "over at ItPF's place". This strikes me as an extension of, and specific instance of the tendency for our language about the internets to betray how we rely on a metaphor of spatial relations to conceive of relations between websites, like links are paths that take you from place to place.
And that reminds me of another one--e.g., "place". A variety of terms that refer IRL to apartments, homes or workplaces end up referring in blog-world to people's blogs. E.g., "place" or "joint".
Also cool from a philosopher's point of view is the way linked hypertext has made indexicals ("here", "there") useful in expository prose in way they can't be in dead-tree media. On paper, you can't say, "As so-and-so argues here", where "here" is linked to another post. I find that use of ostension a very cool characteristic of on-line writing.
This is fun! I'm such a word dork.
Also, the terms SPAM and "troll" have new life on blogs.
Maybe this is too obvious or maybe the word wasn't common enough, but meme has taken on a new meaning.
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