by - 1 Comment

World’s Best Exclamation Point

As a morose little kid I loathed exclamation points, and as an insecure young adult I only used them ironically, when talking about things I hated or when feigning hysteria.

Used gratuitously or insincerely they’re still nauseating, but in the right context a good exclamation point is a fine thing. So I was overjoyed to come across Sheep! magazine, “The Voice of the Independent Flockmaster,” in this article on young farmers.

The people at Sheep! love sheep. Their enthusiasm is sincere and infectious, all the more so for being focused on something most of us probably don’t give a shit about. If Money magazine changed its name to Money!, that would be stupid. But Sheep!? Sheep! is teh alesome.

by - 1 Comment

The House That Wordie Built

And by house I’m not talking about a metaphorical or metaphysical empire of words–I’m talking about an actual house. In which one climbs the bookcase staircase to take a seat under the rafters, surrounded by dictionary plastered walls.

A few of these touches by themselves might be just whimsical, but combine them all and the motif is full-bore OCD, where Martha Stewart gets her MLS and stops taking her meds, a house in which you can’t not read.

And where you sleep under these bed linens, which tell their own bedtime story. Thanks to reesetee for the link, via Miss Cellania.

You’ll be all the cozier knowing the place is insulated with newspaper. Finally a good argument for a physical newspaper instead of the online version: higher R value.

by

Tag All Words in a List

Per the request of Skipvia and others, you can now tag all words in a list in one fell swoop. Click on the ‘add tags’ link on any list page, on the left below the list name.

This tags every word in the list, not the list itself.

If you want to tag every word in a list except for a few, you can bulk-tag the list, then go in to the individual words and remove the tag where not appropriate. So you can tag 498 of the words in a 500 word list in 3 steps, rather than 498.

This is the heart of Wordie: helping you waste time more efficiently.

by - 3 Comments

Breaker Breaker, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog

I was talking with Peter Kafka of SAI yesterday, and he mentioned John Markoff’s disdain for blogs. Sure enough today I was putzing around nytimes.com, as I compulsively do, and came across this:

“John Markoff covers Silicon Valley. He began writing about technology in 1976 and joined The Times in 1988. He gained some notoriety several years ago when he stated that he thought blogs might be the CB radio of the 21st century. He still believes that.”

Not sure how I missed this the first time around but… John, are you on crack?* The innovations wrought by blogs are here to stay.**

CBs died because better technology came along, not because they were a bad idea. We now use cellphones to talk in our cars, and the web to chat with strangers in stilted lingo. With blogs as with CBs, the underlying technology and nomenclature may well change, but the needs they fulfill remain, and will be met.

Many of the characteristic traits of blogs–reader comments, frequent updates, a personal voice–are being incorporated into other forms of media. And as that happens, blogs per se may fade away. Maybe “blog” will be put out to pasture with “information superhighway,”***.

Though I suspect they will stick around and evolve, and we’ll just keep calling them blogs. It’s a succinct and useful word, where “information superhighway” was always an awkward eight syllables, dated on the day it was coined. But just because we don’t call it the “information superhighway” anymore doesn’t mean the Internet isn’t all that and a bag of donuts. Likewise blogs, by that or any other name.

* John, I don’t really think you’re on crack. Hyperbole is a rhetorical device typical of blogs.

** Self-assured pronouncements by those totally unqualified to make them? Also typical.

*** Larding your “posts” with “links”, either for informative purposes or in hopes of getting “link love”**** back from those you’ve linked to? Again, a typical blogging strategy.

**** Bloggers love cutesy phrases like this.