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Griefer, Google Cooking and other Neologisms

Note: This piece was broadcast on Word of Mouth on New Hampshire Public Radio and on WCVE in Richmond VA.
Today’s online world is in overdrive. Think of it as a novelty factory – spewing out new ideas, products, and neologisms – new words, or phrases. Take the word blog, for example, or broadband. These are now old-hat neologisms even my mother would recognize. But neologisms can also be existing words that acquire new meaning, like the term spam. Or the word friend – that’s now a verb! People friend each other on social networking sites like Facebook all the time!
So what better place to look for neologisms than at a conference devoted to the “Future of the Internet”, held by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Click here: to listen to Esther Dyson, Jimmy Wales, Tim Wu and Judith Donath (4 minutes). Or check out this 1 minute video with MIT Media Lab assoc. professor and Harvard fellow Judith Donath

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Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia – the word!

Jimmy Wales, the founder of the free online encylopedia Wikipedia, shares his thoughts on the power of one incredibly successful neologism – that amazing name! Wikipedia is a name he’s “stuck with” — in a good way, of course!
Click here: to listen. (2:13 minutes) And hear what else “Jimbo” had to say that day, to the Chronicle of Higher Education!

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In Search of Neologisms with Esther Dyson

Neologisms are defined as new words or phrases (or new uses of a word or phrase). And what better place to find them than at a gathering of netizens (itself a neologism) steeped in the new world of the “net”. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and ThoughtCast was there, fishing for novelty…
The Catch:
Internet guru Esther Dyson came up with an expression I’d never heard before… Have you? Here’s a clue: what does Google have to do with your refrigerator??!!
Click here: (1 minute) to find out!
But wait, there’s more!