Portmanteau

The use of tags to describe objects on the web will propagate the creation of new words which imply bigger ideas much more succinctly.

Most of these new words will likely be portmanteaux. A portmanteau is a new word which combines the spelling and meaning of two or more words. For example, a spork is a spoon / fork hybrid. Additionally, 'portmanteau' is one of those few words that you can make plural by adding an 'x'.

Hotlanta (hot, Atlanta) is a local favorite.

I seem to tend to use fidiot fairly often when I'm driving in traffic.

The web is already packed with portmanteaux. For example, consider email, emoticon, and, in fact, the word internet itself is derived from international and network.

The Wiktionary has an entire list of useful portmanteaux for your tagging needs.

In this day and age, there is no such thing as too much. So, I have endeavored to create a few of my own.

Blogophytes (blog, neophyte) can't wait to pump up their blego (blog, ego) a little with a successful post on digg.

Note: Don't confuse blego with the portmanteau homograph blego (blog, Lego) which means a blog built out of lots of smaller blogs.

Consider this sentence: I can't believe Ray would work on his blucky (blog, sucky) instead of billing some hours.

EggBlog (Egg Nog, blog) - a blog that is only updated once a year during the holidays.

TroggBlog (The Troggs, blog) - A blog that covers the same 3-chord topics as every other blog on the web. (Not that that is bad. After all, Jimi Hendrix covered Wild Thing.)

Hey! Blog (web, log) is a portmanteau, too.

Here's some more examples:

Parison (Paris, prison) - very topical

rubyatric (Ruby, geriatric) - an aging developer who reads Ruby books just to seem relevant still.

self-developrecating (self deprecating, developer) - a developer who adds methods to the API and then deprecates them in the next release, just for laughs. (See: Research In Motion Device Java Library)

Moonvertising (Moon, advertising) - probably costs more than Adsense.

Moovertising (Moo, advertising) - an idea waiting for someone to jump on it.

sneasel (snot, weasel) - one that I like to use with my kid. That's either a boogle, gang, confusion, or pack of sneasels for you animal-collectiverati out there.

While I did think most all these up myself, I couldn't necessarily take credit for them. Some are just portmantobvious (portmanteau, obvious).

As a final note, the Wikipedia states, "Typically, portmanteau words are neologisms." (070511) What are neologisms? It's a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created.

Once again, to quote from Wikipedia:

"In psychiatry, [neologism] is used to describe the creation of words which only have meaning to the person who uses them. It is considered normal in children, but a symptom of thought disorder indicative of a psychotic mental illness such as schizophrenia in adults. Usage of neologisms may also be related to aphasia acquired after brain damage resulting from a stroke or head injury." (070511)

That being said, what is your favorite portmanteau?

Tag Cloud

Yesterday, I described how tags act as metadata in an image search. Metadata tags can be (and increasing are) associated with any object or concept on the web.

Consider the web site del.icio.us. Due to its name, when I first surfed to del.icio.us, I was concerned that I might encounter images and an endless array of popups which I wouldn't want young children to see. Be honest! When you see that there is a web site called "del.icio.us", what do you think of? Food? Yeah, right! Maybe if someone is wearing the food!

Actually, del.icio.us is a wonderful site where you can store a collection of your favorite links with any choice of associated tags. del.icio.us then tracks all the users that save the same link and all of the tags that are associated with that link. A link's associated tags may be visualized using a "tag cloud". A tag that is used by a large number of users is represented by a larger font.

When you post a new favorite link in del.icio.us, they actually suggest tags to use for that link (if the link has been posted before). This technique helps to build some sense of congruence amongst the users of the community. With del.icio.us, web searches can be made based on how other users have tagged their favorite sites.

This all leads to today's haiku...

lust, gluttony, greed,
sloth, wrath, envy, pride - deadly
sins or great tag cloud?

Tags

How do you search a database of images? One solution would be to associate metadata with the image. Metadata is data(2) about data(1). In this case, data(1) would be a particular image, while data(2) might take the form of text based descriptive tags. For example, the following image may have the tags "ireland", "ocean", "landscape", "green", "photo", etc. associated with it.



Now when someone enters text "ireland" into an image search engine this image should come up as one of the results. Unfortunately, the search engine is only as good as the tags associated with the image. If the searcher entered "moher" into the engine, the image would not make the list even though it is a picture of the Cliffs of Moher.

Who tags all these images? Well... we, the users, tag the images.

My description of image searching is particularly simplified. I have no idea if this is how the photo site Flickr works. But it might...

Please note that I am not paid to promote Flickr. If you would like to change that, please contact my business department.