Let’s see. In that same week I managed to almost get sued by Beyonce Knowles’ lawyers, I lost a fair bit of my online portfolio due to sheer stupidity (for the first time ever I tried to play it safe – bad idea), I came down with an overdue illness, I got ideas for 200+ domains and some 10 sites, and wrote a research paper on why technology serves as empirical proof to the concept of Post-Modernism. At the same time I’ve ignored e-mail and my blog almost completely.

Having returned, I got about 40 hours of sleep in three days, then spent two days catching up on e-mails (870 e-mails after filtering out junk!). Unsurprisingly, about 30 new mashups popped all over the board – a few trying to get into socnetverse, plenty trying to usurp the world of gadgets… all in all perhaps 2-3 sites worth a second glance.

I will start doing my second review of Minggl right after this – it’s been 70% finished since last week so it shouldn’t take too long. I’m about 800 posts behind on my RSS readings, so I’m sure there’s plenty more things to look at.

Either way, I am sorry to have vanished just like that – I guess my personal blog is the only thing for which I have not written a contingency plan Yet! Oh, before I forget – AllAdvantage is back as Agloco – with a much better business plan and definitely a much better timing. Considering that I made decent money with them (and always thought the idea was ingenious, but far from fraud-proof) and that I was also one of the few people who went with Travelzoo’s offer of free stock eight years ago and held onto it for a 1250% return, woooo hoooo. Expect a lot more on this topic, and a review of its backend to ensure its safety as soon as the viewbar is out.

In my first post I laid out the basics of what I’ll call the organics of language. I’ve also indicated a possible danger of rendering the English language poor by having most of its speakers use a limited vocabulary. Today I’d like to continue and perhaps conclude both ideas.

Before going further, a “generational” disclaimer should follow. A lot of comments seen these days on blogs that deal with writing extensively are of the type: “stop annoying people with something as dated as spelling rules”, “people have better things to do”, “this is so not from our generation”, “who cares how i write when i im me friends”, etc. There is a sort of stigma attached to grammar and spelling that makes them seem out-of-fashion, not cool. Now, that’s quite important as peer pressure applies in many ways and nobody will willingly make a fool out of himself/herself for the sake of grammar or spelling.

Now, the generation of rule-defenders, for lack of a better term, points out another interesting phenomenon present on many people’s blogs: improper use of the exclamation mark. People will utter most common words and phrases and just randomly attach exclamation marks at the end! Why? My theory is that the answer lies at the core of a weblog. Blogs are designed to deal with the everyday, the common, the unimportant. Blog is to a regular website what television is to the cinema – one is an everyday happening, the other a spectacle. In that sense, adding unneeded exclamation marks produces an artificial sensation of excitement; flare is being added rather than being inherent to the text.

These two points seem unrelated, but I’m trying to show a convergence of plural ideas that could be combined into one interesting concept. If we allow that language, indeed, is organic, then it should follow that it can borrow from both ends of the temporal spectrum – the old and the new. When messaging then, perhaps there should not be an insistence that we follow all rules of spelling and grammar where there’s a danger that a) it would break the flow of the conversation, or b) that it would thwart the content being produced. Similarly then, blogs could benefit from not overusing certain punctuation marks if people could understand blogs’ real worth – duplicating and reflecting the everyday, the repetitive, the common, the base, the gray. There is no point to adding sensation where there is none; paper and broadcast media do that well enough already.

A few weeks ago I got into a conversation about interstellar travel, which in under fifteen minutes changed into a heated debate between two participants over the placement of one comma in the work we were discussing. One of the guys was British-educated and so a proponent of the Oxford comma rule, which generally forbids a comma to be placed before the preposition ‘and’. The hell that ensued was neither very academic in terms of the language used, nor very productive as it completely neglected the real topic at hand… that of interstellar travel.

The point to be made here is once again that of convergence. Punctuation, rules of spelling and grammar are generally here to aid us in making ourselves better understood. If they are to serve a purpose, use them wisely. If they do not serve any purpose, do not misuse them either. And when they become the center of attention, which they never should… well, I say discard them altogether. While semi-colons, en- and em-dashes are all important to formulating complex linguistic ideas (see Joyce’s Ulysses: Circe or Oxen of the Sun chapters for a demonstration of what a complex sentence can look like,) they are not integral to the formulation of the meaning as meaning can always be inferred from the context (which is of course the only reason why IM jargon works).

English language will not be impoverished that easily. The ratio at which new words are being added is much higher than that at which words are being dropped. Granted, only a relatively small group of people will be able to use a significant vocabulary, which may lead to elitism, but that has always been the case; only now it becomes a little more apparent. However, the existence of elites, whether acknowledged or not, has always been at the centre of all systems of power, and while they may be disliked for a variety of valid and not-so-valid reasons, they do ensure the survival of the system they care for – in this case a language.

Interestingly, both, the use of proper English, and the use of colloquial IM English have changed over the years. In the early days of BBSing, it was considered elite (or l33t) to interchange letters or words with similar numbers or even better, extended ASCII & ANSI characters). Some changes have made their way into common usage, such as ‘2′ for ‘to’, ‘4′ for ‘four’, ‘l8r’ for ‘later’. Certain expressions are reserved for online use only and are not commonly known to off-line users or older generations – here we have ‘lol’, ‘rofl’, ‘lmao’, ‘brb’, etc. I’ve heard a person use ‘lol’ in verbal communication this weekend and I must say that it was hilarious…

Anyway, at some point the underground scene decided that this was not longer ‘l33t’, but that instead this was lame, and so this practice was dropped on a wider scale. The practice of integrating neologisms that have been crafted from cute-sounding or cute-looking diminutives – such as spelling a common name in 20 possible ways to make it more ‘original’ or spelling ‘love’ as ‘luv’ came later, and well, that one stuck around.

In proper Enlgish, the changes are obvious, though sometimes not so perceptible. We are all aware of changes between Old, Middle and current English; some of us know this thanks to an intimate relationship with the language, while others will remember it because of having had to suffer through Shakespeare in high school. It should also be pointed out that all the major dictionaries – Oxford, Cambridge and Miriam-Webster add thousands of words during each revision, which up until yesterday may have been thought of as either non-existent or at least “netspeak”. And several hundred words are usually dropped as archaic.

In many American and Canadian education systems, a worrisome trend can also be observed. While English as a Second Language courses are taught in a very formal fashion, with attention to rules of spelling, grammar, punctuation and pronunciation, regular English courses are not. For a long while this seemed to work fine, but with “netspeak” being the primary written mode of communication in English for a majority of adolescents, there is an up-and-coming threat of a serious impoverishment of the language. This threat has been verbalized before, but the primary reason for this worry was one of the implications of the “universalization” of English; one which suggested that most speakers of English will operate using a very limited vocabulary.

The big question is of course “should we care?” Can anything be done to prevent this? Is this development a conspiracy? All of these questions are valid and I will attempt to tackle them in my next post – stay tuned!

Updated: link to part 2…

Whether you belong to the camp of social activists and would like to see governments subsidizing our homeless citizens or to the crowd that would see the same government enacting laws to clean up our modern streets of annoying beggars, one thing is certain – you do not associate the homeless with the Internet.

Yet here they are, slowly making their move towards the still vastly uncontrolled and liberal domain. Some do it to make a living, others to promote their grassroots ideologies a la mode de early Radio Free Europe (some have even started podcasting). Indeed, the decreased (or in some cases non-existent) costs of Internet access are allowing even the most impoverished of social strata transcend into the digital age.

Truthfully, this is starting to make me wonder and not because I would ever begrudge Internet access to anybody – especially not to the homeless. I cannot even begin to express how content I feel about any initiative to wire up the entire Globe – the likes of what Google is doing in San Francisco. What I do worry about is the long-term social effect of such transitions.

‘X’ many years ago, basic needs were clearly separated from desires – basic shelter, food, and the ability to exercise personal freedom were sufficient. Consumerism and the ‘liberalization of the global community’ have had the unfortunate effect of raising our understanding of ‘basic needs’ to nearly ridiculous levels. Reverse discrimination, ultra-feminism, terrorists appealing for better treatment on humane grounds – these are all such examples. Now however, I am almost expecting broadband internet service to become a value-added bonus to welfare packages. Better yet, I’m also expecting a sudden wave of enthusiasm on grounds of (pause for a buzzword!) more equitable treatment, followed by a wave of delayed dissertations on ‘Internet furthers procrastination, not job-searches among the needy’ and so on.

Still, while I have always appealed for common-sense (in this example fulfillment of true basic needs), in my geek’s heart of hearts I am full of amazement and respect for what these people have done. To not be certain about dinner and to be sitting there recording a podcast takes some serious commitment and passion.