Ever since I first wrote a short text titled “Not a Damn Blog” back in August 2002, I’ve been watching with some interest the emerging trends in internet technology, and the ways they’re being described, jargonised and lionised.

The good news, from an observer’s point of view, is that not a lot has changed. That’s the bad news too.

We’ve entered a new “tech bubble”, without anyone quite realising it. It’s still about hyperbole and over-valuation, but the action isn’t on Wall Street this time. Instead, it’s taking place in convoluted blog threads, and the commodity being shifted is buzzwords; a new one seemingly every month.

Will the bubble burst? I’m honestly not sure. The nature of language development suggests that we’ll see more of a deflation, the majority of buzz phrases fading into obscurity after a few short months or years of excitement.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: it’ll be an absolute hoot for cultural historians years from now.

There are huge upsides to be had at the moment. Although it’s fragmented into uselessly competing versions, RSS has become a useful syndication format, taken seriously by big players and used extensively by smaller ones. New generations of tag-driven content sites such as delicious and flickr are doing interesting things to the way we organise our information and share it.

There are many things to celebrate. The language surrounding these innovations, generally, is not one of them.

I have a number of problems with the way people are talking about current innovations, but they boil down broadly to three things:

1. The coinage of spectacularly ugly new words, often without a concrete definition attached.
2. Wild claims about the ability of new technologies to “change the future”, way before the future has a chance to decide on the matter.
3. A bizarre sort of technological wrong-headedness, particularly acute when a group of technology enthusiasts forget that 90+% of the world isn’t like them.

There are several areas where these problems are particularly rife, and I want to examine some of them individually over the next few weeks, expanding on the above three points as I go.

First, a bit of history

2002 was the first year I really got my stuff together and put anything resembling a website together. Sure, I’d had homepages since 1996, but they were lacking a certain something. Content, basically.

A quiet rumbling about “blogs” had been brewing since 1999, but by 2002 it was a fully-fledged chattering sound. Something about the entire thing made me deeply uncomfortable, and I took a brief stab at articulating why.

That brief stab was a piece called Not a Damn Blog, and it was probably the most visited page this domain has ever had.

At the start of 2003, the Guardian newspaper published a long “Survival Guide” detailing the year’s likely up-and-coming tech trends. I was hardly an internet outsider, yet half the jargon terms used were gobbledy-gook. Much of the rest of the piece seemed to display a lack of awareness of the state of the technology market.

I was sufficiently moved to write a debunking of the entire thing, something which I intended to be the start of an ongoing series questioning net buzzwordery. Sadly, the project got buried under serious illness, but nevertheless, it paved the way for my ongoing scepticism towards made-up net jargon.

The most incredible thing I find, re-reading that debunking piece over two years later, is that I was mostly right. A lot of the neologisms therein have already fallen by the wayside. A lot of the technologies have had their predicted delays, or lack of interest.

I’ve been mostly quiet (barring the occasional flail) for the past 2 years, but here we are in 2005 with a whole new set of neologistic demons rising. So, where do the problems lie?

Individual Explorations

1. Not A Damn Blog 2005
2. Folksonomy, a Misnomer
3. Podcasting, a White Elephant

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Tuesday, March 15th, 2005 at 10:35 pm .
It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: Geeking, Trends and culture.
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There are thousands of articles on this very subject all over the internet. 39% of them are cleverly-disguised attempts to sell you little blue pills, 26% of them lead inevitably to a badly-researched, logically inconsistent Wikipedia article and 5% are written in an ancient Navajo dialect which is only spoken by 2 professors. The remaining 30% are, like this one, of very little interest to anyone besides their original author (and even he's a bit bored by it).