In our monthly Wordnik newsletter (which you, too, can get in your in-box by subscribing to our Word of the Day via email) last month we asked for volunteers for a new feature, our Wordnik of the Month. We got a great response, and are happy to feature Madison Andrews as our very first WotM (pronounced “whottem”)!

Madison Andrews is a journalist, editor, and graphic designer based in Austin, Texas. When she isn’t posting SAT Critical Reading and Writing advice on her blog, Mad Skills Vocabulary, she is a columnist and contributor for A New Domain and Tech Page One. Follow Madison
@madskillsvocab, or send her an email.

Of course, we had some questions for Madison …

1. How do you use Wordnik?

I use Wordnik to enrich the educational content on Mad Skills
Vocabulary. I’m particularly excited about our latest feature, Mad Skills Word Search, which I designed with Paul Bonner of NimbleQuick studios.

Mad Skills Word Search is a web app that uses the Wordnik API to provide definitions and examples of SAT words. So, say you’re a student, and you run across the word perfidious in a blog post or word list on the Mad Skills Vocabulary site. You could click on that link to find several different definitions and context sentences for the word.

Word Search is still in the early stages of development, but we’re excited to see where this project will lead. Currently, the only way to invoke the application is to click on a linked word in an article or word list on Mad Skills Vocabulary, but we’ll be adding a search page to the Mad Skills Word Search site. We also hope to eventually allow our users to take advantage of some of Wordnik’s more exotic offerings – etymologies and related words and audio pronunciations.

We’re also interested in building a community of Mad Skills users, and will be doing some other cool stuff in that direction, as well.

2. What’s your favorite thing about Wordnik?

My favorite thing about Wordnik is that it makes language fun, engaging, and interactive. Most students can’t learn new words and truly expand their vocabularies just by memorizing lists of SAT or AP exam words. They need to interact with a word, see several definitions, read lots of examples, hear the word, learn how it relates to other words that they know. Really get to the point where they can almost taste it. That’s what Wordnik provides, and that’s what I hope to provide in a more targeted way for the students who visit Mad Skills Vocabulary. For Mad Skills, the Wordnik API makes that possible.

3. What’s your all-time favorite Wordnik list?

Gravity’s Rainbow by dfw2008.

4. What one thing do you wish Wordnik would do (that it doesn’t now)?

Well, one thing we’re thinking about for Mad Skills is adding an interactive flash card application, and maybe even practice exams for high school and college students, and I agree with many of the users on your community forums that some kind of flash card capability would be a great addition to Wordnik, as well. But really, at this point we’re more focused on the API and figuring out how to take advantage of everything it provides, and we’re very happy with what we’ve seen so far.

5. What are some of your other favorite sites online?

• Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
• The New Yorker
• UPPERCASE Magazine blog

… and whatever site I end up choosing as a replacement for Google Reader,
currently Feedly.

Would you like to be a Wordnik of the Month? Email us at feedback@wordnik.com with your answers to these questions, and enjoy your fifteen minutes of wordy fame …

We’re excited to announce today the forming of a new company, Reverb Technologies, Inc., which will incorporate Wordnik.com.

Over the past five or so years, as we’ve been working on Wordnik.com, we’ve realized that the technology we’ve been developing — not just Wordnik, but things like Swagger and a bunch of other tools and systems — was making Wordnik bigger on the inside than on the outside.

tardis, by feitoamao

With Wordnik.com, we’ve focused on one word at a time, and late last year we showed a little of what we could do at a slightly bigger scale with the beta launch of Related Content by Wordnik (now called Reverb for Publishers) but with the launch of Reverb today, we’re working to bring our technology to more developers, more publishers, and more consumers.

What does this mean for Wordnik.com? Well, Wordnik is now free to do what it does best — be a fantastic dictionary offering “360-degree views” of words, the biggest in the world, with the best users. We won’t have to drown it in ads, and we can continue to work on making it the best “single-word” view on Reverb’s word graph technology. The data we get from how users interact with Wordnik — listing, commenting, favoriting, and tagging words — will continue to be an important part of Reverb’s mission of connecting people with meaningful content.

As part of our continuing work on Wordnik.com, we’re happy to announce a new beta feature today — Wordmaps. Here’s one for apt (which is what we hope you think our new name is):

In the maps, squares get their size from the amount of “Wordnik love” a word has received (including listing and loves, among other things) and the color of the squares is driven by our calculation of how much the related word “matches” the mapped word. This feature is still in beta while we tweak our algorithms, so feedback is greatly appreciated!

(Also, check out the new floaty menus, a much-requested feature to help make it easier to jump right to whatever part of the word page you need.)

There’s much more coming, both from Reverb and for Wordnik.com. We’re looking forward to sharing it all with you!

[Photo: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by feitoamao]

We’re happy to welcome Adam to the Wordnik team!

Adam Van Fossen is a market trend and business development professional. Prior to joining Wordnik, Adam was working in the mobile gaming industry at GREE, where he was building strategic partnerships with top tier content providers.

Adam’s career path took many twists and turns before landing in business development. He has worked as a photographer, on a dude ranch in Japan, and in a gold mine in Nevada.

In his free time, Adam enjoys snapping photos on his antique cameras, playing guitar, and hanging out with his wife and adorable basset hound.

We’re very glad to have Adam with us!

We are very happy to welcome Katie Cushmore to Wordnik, as our new VP of Marketing! Katie is a veteran marketing professional who has worked with prominent social media and technology firms on the west coast, and has significant start-up experience. She began her career in media at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners focusing on traditional media for consumer brands. She was a partner at two digital firms, Black Bag Advertising and the online arm of Odiorne, Wilde, Narraway and Partners, specializing in online consumer brands and social media serving clients such as Amazon, EA, HP, Sony, Intel, Travelocity, Google, and Toyota. She served as Marketing Director at Yahoo, was the first Sales MarCom hire at Twitter, and was VP of Marketing at NetShelter, the largest network of independent technology blogs. Katie received a BA degree from Bates College and an MA degree in Counseling Psychology from The Wright Institute.

We’re happy to be welcoming two new Wordniks — Jeff Barbose, who joins Wordnik today, and Andy Loong, who has recently joined us full-time.

Jeff is a software architect and UX designer with more than twenty years of experience designing and creating user interfaces and applications; the last dozen have been specific to native iOS and Mac OS X app development. This included a stint as a Senior Application Architect at Apple Inc. He’d tell you what he was working on, but, well … you know.
He also participated in the first go-round of eBooks at NuvoMedia, helping to design and implement the RocketLibrarian for Mac which accompanied the Rocket eBook device.
The best software and user experience, in his opinion, delight the user and make interacting with devices so well-suited to the task that the user doesn’t recall the details of having used them.
Jeff also writes long-form fiction, keeps a blog, paints, sketches, and invents new creative outlets when required. His academic background in biological sciences has allowed him to anticipate advances in software engineering and best practices: our industry has yet to invent anything in software that life hasn’t already accomplished in nature.

Before Wordnik, Andy worked at HP/Palm as Operations Manager overseeing the HP WebOS cloud services data centers, where he took on the challenge to architect and implement the first generation cloud services infrastructure for WebOS. Over three years, Andy built multiple data centers in the US, the EU, and China to support millions of Palm customers. All the data centers that Andy has built are “lights-out style,” meaning that everything is managed remotely and programmatically to engage servers into services, so six data centers (plus of development, QA and stress test environments) could be run with only a few system admin on staff.
Before Palm, Andy was at Mobitv where he built the network that is currently used by Sprint. Andy has also worked at Siemens Business Division, managing some of their high-security data centers.

We’re happy to have Jeff and Andy on the team!

We’re happy to announce that Joe Spector has joined Wordnik as our first Director of Business Development!

As our new Director of BD, Joe will lead and implement partnership efforts for Wordnik and manage relationships with major publishers, content providers and mobile application developers.

Prior to joining Wordnik, Joe has worked at a number of mobile and online media companies including GREE, Meebo (acquired by Google) and SAY Media (formerly VideoEgg) all in a business development capacity. These experiences provide industry knowledge and relationships that will be instrumental in shaping distribution and revenue growth at Wordnik.

Originally from Uzbekistan, Joe can speak fluent Russian and can put away a lot of desserts. Joe received his bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from UC Berkeley and his MBA from The Wharton School. Follow him on Twitter at @joespector.