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We’re excited to present this special guest post.

The always awesome Grammar Monkeys have nominated me, Wordnik, for a Versatile Blogger Award. The rules say I need to list seven interesting things about myself and nominate 15 other blogs. And away we go!

Here are seven things you may not know about me:

1. My birth name was Alphabeticall (yeah, I like Wordnik better too).
2. Although I was born in 2008, I’ll only be turning one next month. (Guess why.)
3. My favorite word is madeupical.
4. I only eat foods that are portmanteaus (tangelo, turducken, cherpumple, etc.).
5. I live above a bank.
6. My roommates annoy me blow off steam by playing ping pong and shooting each other with Nerf guns.
7. I’m still gunning for a “take this word and shove it” feature.

And here are 15 blogs I love (in no particular order):

• Fritinancy. From Nancy Friedman. Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.
• The Virtual Linguist. Susan Harvey is a linguist in Great Britain.
• Word Spy. A great resource for new words.
• Dialect Blog. Everything you ever wanted to know about accents and dialects in English.
• K International. A terrific source on all things language, especially endangered and disappearing languages.
• The Language of Food. Food, words – what’s not to love?
• Sesquiotica. Fun with all kinds of words and language.
• Throw Grammar from the Train. I was sad to see Jan Freeman’s column at the Boston Globe go, but happy that she started this blog.
• Macmillan Dictionary Blog. A wide range of topics from a variety of language experts.
• Arnold Zwicky. Amusing, fun, and informative.
• Grammarphobia. Answers common questions about grammar.
• Book Bench. The New Yorker’s literary blog.
• Lists of Note. What can I say? I love lists.
• Flavorwire. The culture blog of Flavorpill.
• PWxyz. The blog of Publishers Weekly, often includes lists of weird writerly things, such as 5 Authors Famous for Something Else, 11 Author Day Jobs, and 5 Fictional Diseases in Literature You Don’t Want to Be Real.

And the rules! Feel free to disregard.

1. In a post on your blog, nominate 15 fellow bloggers for The Versatile Blogger Award.
2. In the same post, add the Versatile Blogger Award.
3. In the same post, thank the blogger who nominated you in a post with a link back to their blog.
4. In the same post, share 7 completely random pieces of information about yourself.
5. In the same post, include this set of rules.
6. Inform each nominated blogger of their nomination by posting a comment on each of their blogs. [Or tweeting, like I did.]

Thanks again Grammar Monkeys!

Wordnik is participating in the day of protest against the (now-temporarily-shelved) SOPA Act (Stop Online Piracy Act) and the (still active) PIPA Act (Protect IP Act).

What’s SOPA? Here are some example sentences that we think make it clear that this bill is a bad idea:

SOPA – the Stop Online Piracy Act – and a sister bill, PIPA – the Protect IP Act – seek to minimize the dissemination of copyrighted material online by targeting sites that promote and enable the sharing of copyright-protected material, like The Pirate Bay. While this goal may be laudable, entrepreneurs, legal scholars and free speech activists are worried about the consequences of these bills for the architecture of the Internet. Ethan Zuckerman: MIT Media Lab opposes SOPA, PIPA

[T]he bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure. Based upon nothing more than an application by a federal prosecutor alleging that a foreign website is “dedicated to infringing activities,” Protect IP authorizes courts to order all U.S. Internet service providers, domain name registries, domain name registrars, and operators of domain name servers—a category that includes hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and the like—to take steps to prevent the offending site’s domain name from translating to the correct Internet protocol address. These orders can be issued even when the domains in question are located outside of the United States and registered in top-level domains (e.g., .fr, .de, or .jp) whose operators are themselves located outside the United States; indeed, some of the bills’ remedial provisions are directed solely at such domains. Stanford Law Review: Don’t Break the Internet

At a minimum, this means that [under SOPA] any service that hosts user generated content is going to be under enormous pressure to actively monitor and filter that content. That’s a huge burden, and worse for services that are just getting started – the YouTubes of tomorrow that are generating jobs today. EFF: “SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet”

Now, enter SOPA. § 103 of SOPA allows private parties to require payment processors and advertising services to cut ties with websites that are allegedly “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property.” Note: this is all done outside of the court system, so no judge actually reviews any of these claims before they’re enforced by the payment and ad networks. Public Knowledge: SOPA and Section 1201: A Frightening Combination

The latest move in a decades-long battle with piracy and copyright infringement is a bill called the PROTECT-IP Act that would essentially allow the U.S. government to block access to sites they deemed inappropriate. The bill would criminalize posting all sorts of standard web content — music playing in the background of videos, footage of people dancing, kids playing video games, and posting video of people playing cover songs. A move that would not only stifle free speech and creative expression, but potentially endanger hundreds of user-generated media sites like Vimeo, Tumblr, SoundCloud and more. The Creators Project: Artists Band Together To Fight Censorship And Oppose The PROTECT-IP Act

Laws like SOPA make us sclerotic as a country, where we have all these extra burdens that provide little benefit. In general it makes America less competitive. If SOPA goes through, it could very well force certain innovative companies to go offshore. There are incumbent industries that will always protest every new technology; but any forward-looking country needs to protect its emerging industries. GigaOm: Tim O’Reilly: Why I’m fighting SOPA

So you don’t run a website … how might SOPA and PIPA affect you?

The harm that does to ordinary, non-infringing users is best described via a hypothetical user: Abe. Abe has never even so much as breathed on a company’s copyright but he does many of the things typical of Internet users today. He stores the photos of his children, now three and six years old, online at PickUpShelf* so that he doesn’t have to worry about maintaining backups. He is a teacher and keeps copies of his classes accessible for his students via another service called SunStream that makes streaming audio and video easy. He engages frequently in conversation in several online communities and has developed a hard-won reputation and following on a discussion host called SpeakFree. And, of course, he has a blog called “Abe’s Truths” that is hosted on a site called NewLeaflet. He has never infringed on any copyright and each of the entities charged with enforcing SOPA know that he hasn’t.

And yet, none of that matters. Under SOPA, every single one of the services that Abe uses can be obliterated from his view without him having any remedy. Abe may wake up one morning and not be able to access any of his photos of his children. Neither he, nor his students, would be able to access any of his lectures. His trove of smart online discussions would likewise evaporate and he wouldn’t even be able to complain about it on his blog. And, in every case, he has absolutely no power to try to regain access. That may sound far-fetched but under SOPA, all that needs to happen for this scenario to come true is for the Attorney General to decide that some part of PickUpShelf, SunStream, SpeakFree and NewLeaflet would be copyright infringement in the US. If a court agrees, and with no guarantee of an adversarial proceeding that seems very likely, the entire site is “disappeared” from the US internet. Bricoleur: Overbroad Censorship & Users

You can track this legislation and read the full text here.

At Wordnik, we’re against piracy, but we think that SOPA and PIPA create more problems than they solve. So we’re happy to stand alongside such giants of the Internet as Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, O’Reilly Media, WordPress, Reddit, BoingBoing, and ICanHazCheezburger and add our voices to the chorus of those protesting this ill-thought-out and Internet-wrecking legislation.

Want an easy way to make your opinion heard in Congress? You can send emails via FightForTheFuture.org and AmericanCensorship.org. (AmericanCensorship.org also has HTML code for you to use to add a black “Stop Censorship” banner to your own blog or site.)

If you’re in San Francisco, you can join an in-person protest Wednesday from noon to 2 p.m.; details here. (Ditto New York and Seattle.)

And if you have an Android device, here’s a link to an app that will help you boycott SOPA-supporting companies and organizations.

PS Our word of the day today, spiflicate, is also in protest of SOPA and PIPA. SOPA and PIPA are set to spiflicate (‘stifle, suffocate, kill’) the Internet; but before that happens we hope to spiflicate (‘beat, confound, dismay’) them!

Happy New Year, everyone! We wanted to give you a roundup of the latest Wordnik news and reminders about some of our fun features and products.

We rang in 2012 with a profile in The New York Times, Wordnik’s Online Dictionary, No Arbiters Please, while our President and CEO, Joe Hyrkin, was interviewed by IdeaMensch. Last month we launched the Wordnik-powered financial dictionary for SmartMoney.com of The Wall Street Journal (check out our blog post for more details).

Wordnik was highlighted in GigaOM’s NoSQL’s great, but bring your A game, while our special all-Glee edition of Word Soup, was featured at WetPaint.

Also, Wordnik is still hiring! Check out our jobs page for open positions and to apply.

To remind you, every weekend Erin McKean pens The Wall Street Journal feature, “The Week in Words,” a field guide to unusual words in that week’s WSJ issue. The latest installment rounds up 2011′s most interesting linguistic trends.

Did you get a Nook over the holidays? If so, you might be interested in their Word of the Day app, powered by Wordnik. And if your word nerd wishlist went unfulfilled, treat yourself to these Pocket Posh Word Power dictionaries.

Wordnik means business — we’re happy to announce today that Wordnik is powering SmartMoney.com’s new financial terms glossary!

The New SmartMoney Glossary

With more than 4000 words and phrases, SmartMoney’s new glossary is the place to go to make sense of the words that matter in your financial life. Keeping track of your finances is difficult enough, without the added hurdle of wading through financial jargon, too. Wordnik helps demystify opaque terms such as recission, dilution, and butterfly spread, making it easier for you to make meaningful choices about how you live your financial life. In addition to traditional definitions and explanatory notes, the new SmartMoney glossary also includes helpful example sentences showing the terms in real-world contexts, from up-to-date articles from across the The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.

Alongside the stand-alone glossary, selected articles in the The Wall Street Journal Digital Network will also have a useful footer line to highlight important terms you may want to look up.

To provide the example sentences, Wordnik has analyzed thousands of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network articles (from SmartMoney, The Wall Street Journal, and MarketWatch) to show the most explanatory and illuminating content for the most important words and concepts, leading readers to current trending articles as well as rich archival information. Taken together, these enhancements will not only allow SmartMoney readers to understand the traditional meanings of important financial terms, but will also let them interact with news content in ways that provide fresh discovery of words, phrases, concepts, and entire articles.

If you’re a developer and have seen the Wordnik Developer documentation, you might have noticed some links to raw JSON like this. Behind all that lovely notation is the Swagger API framework. We needed to solve some recurring sources of pain at Wordnik, and we knew how our needs were going to evolve, so we took a proactive step and built Swagger.

First, our documentation was really tough to keep up to date. When you’re in a situation where your capabilities precede your documentation, you can end up in a tough spot: Your users are unable to benefit from the tools you’ve worked so hard to build, or they end up using them the wrong way. Both are bummers for developers, who typically have many choices and should get your best efforts.

As we made updates to our API, it got harder and harder to keep our client libraries current. Add an API, modify all your drivers. As with documentation, this is an unnecessarily tedious thing to do. Our developer community helped out tremendously by open-sourcing a number of different libraries, but this led to “driver drift”. Our developers shouldn’t have to worry about writing our code! It’s our job to make it easy.

Next, we needed a way to create APIs for our partners. Guess what? The same two previous issues apply. More busywork for us.

Finally, we needed a zero-code way to try out our API. A real sandbox — not white papers, video tours, slide decks. A full-featured mechanism to call the API without monkeying with code.

So that was our goal. The outcome is what we now call Swagger. So how does this thing work? Should you use it?

Our server produces a Resource Declaration. This is like a sitemap for the API — it tells what APIs are available for the person asking. Who is asking? Well, if you pass your API key, the Swagger framework shows what is associated with that principal! That keeps sensitive APIs from being exposed. It also gives you a way to let people try out new features in an incremental fashion. It’s completely pluggable and we provide some simple, demo implementations.

Follow one of the paths to an API and you get all the operations available to the client, an operation being an HTTP method + a resource path. Look further and you’ll see something useful — the input and output models! Now you know what you’re going to get before you call. It’s a contract between your server and the client.

So that’s all fine and dandy but what’s the use? How do we address the pain points from above?

Well, once you know both how to call an API and what you get back, you can do some interesting things. First, how about a sandbox? There’s really not much to it — you can see it in action at petstore.swagger.wordnik.com and developer.wordnik.com. Neat! Simple sandbox, calls your API exactly how you would from your code. You can try out those different levers to calling an API without editing your source. Heck, even your boss can try out the API!

Next, how about clients? Well, we wrote a code generator which creates clients in a number of languages. Don’t like our codegen style? We’re not offended! It’s template driven. Make your own templates, or even your own code generator. Best of all, change your API and rebuild your client libraries. It’s all *automatic*. And for those folks who want special APIs? Build them their own client by passing their API key in. Really, it works.

Finally, documentation. Wasn’t that the first point in this post? Yes! If you look in one of our sample Swagger apps, you’ll see how this is accomplished.

See that code? The documentation is built in. This function defines the GET method of the /findByStatus path. There is a required query param with allowable values of “available, pending, sold”, with a default value of “available”. It returns a Pet object. Best of all, it serves as both the input declaration as well as the documentation system. See here:

http://petstore.swagger.wordnik.com/#!/pet/findPetsByStatus_GET

All of Swagger is open-source. Check out swagger.wordnik.com for a list of repos. More on the Swagger roadmap in an upcoming post!

We’re happy to announce we’ve made some updates and improvements to our site.

Feedback

Your feedback is important to us and so we’ve made it even easier for you.

Wherever you are in the site (except, for now, the blog), at the top left you’ll see a gray Feedback tag. To send us a comment, just click on the tag and fill in the dialog box.

Once you submit, an email will be sent to those of us managing the feedback channel. You can also see all the reported issues and their statuses in one place.

Profile Page

Your comments are now front and center on your Profile Page.

In addition, if you have a picture uploaded in Gravatar, it will automatically appear beside your user name.

Word Page

Definitions are now grouped by dictionary source.

Community

As on the Profile Page, recent comments are the focus of the Community page. You can still also find:

• recently loved (or favorited) words
• trending words
• new lists
• recently listed words
• top listers

Lists

Comments are back! You can now add comments to your own and anyone’s lists.

You can also now see the list’s Contributors and how many words each Contributor has added to that particular list.

To see a word’s stats, just hover it.

You’ll see number of other lists that word appears in, and the number of comments the word has.

Also, you can now add multiple words at once to each list, by separating each word with a semicolon.

Go to the bottom of the list to add words.

We’ll be rolling out more updates over the next several weeks. As always, let us know what you think, either via the Feedback tag or by emailing us at feedback@wordnik.com

We’re happy to announce the addition of Gregg Carrier to Wordnik!

Gregg joins us as a Senior Server Engineer and comes to us from DreamWorks Animation, where he worked on core service infrastructure for their next generation of animation tools. Gregg has also taught community college CS classes, beertended in the Anderson Valley, worked at a winery, was a park ranger at Shenandoah National Park, and has been a ski instructor!

In his non-server-engineering time, Gregg homebrews (and has for 18 years!), loves scuba diving, hiking, and camping (and is waiting for his two little boys to get big enough to do those things, too). He also plays the ukulele and spins glow poi. Gregg (the extra ‘g’ is for ‘great’) can be reached at gregg@wordnik.com.