Zeitgeist Words

Googlenym

Google can accurately award a five-word identity to most concepts. David Weinberger coined the term "googlenym" in 2004. A googlenym could be a meme, a concise term or a fragment of a phrase. All electronic properties possess metadata that can morph into an unexpected result when harvested through request made by searching Google.

deracinated

deracinated -- plucked up by the roots

PSA Velocity

Researchers who studied 1,095 men showed that men need annual PSA tests so that their year-to-year change -- called PSA velocity -- can be monitored. They found that when PSA levels rose by at least 2 points during the year before surgery, about one in four patients died from prostate cancer within seven years. It raised the risk of death 10-fold. But if the PSA level had been increasing slowly before surgery, there was very little chance the patient would die from a prostate tumor.

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Gene Emery -- "Test predicts prostate cancer death, study says"
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Price Advantage

"Price advantage" is the ability to come up with the right prices more consistently than competitors. Having the price advantage would let you know when you are indeed pricing too high and appropriately adjusting downward when that makes sense. It's not about always being too high or too low. It's about understanding the power of having the right price for as many transactions in the market as you can.

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Michael Marn -- "Companies must learn to achieve the price advantage"
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Horizontal Thinking

When you think about how knowledge workers innovate, you're dealing with "horizontal thinking." IBM senior VP Nick Donofrio says that while the 20th century was all about invention, in the 21st century, "innovation will not be that way. Real growth and prosperity will depend on how a business problem is meshed with technology… Using technology to create better innovative applications, that's where inventions will occur.

For example, a supermarket using technology to encourage customers to put
more groceries into their basket. A shopkeeper, being able to identify what his customers are buying and in real-time trigger off instant offers on complementary products, like a wine buyer being induced to buy cheese at a lesser cost than the usual price. True innovation begins at the intersection of invention and insight."

Donofrio notes that the 21st century innovator must be well-versed in technology, but "the problems in the 21st century will not be just engineering problems, they will be more complex business problems." And those will force people to think horizontally and not just vertically.

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Economic Times -- "Innovation at IBM: an inside view"
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RSS

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the extensible markup language behind much of the information flowing into websites, news readers and magazine editors. Dave Winer helped define RSS in 1996 and derivatives of this programming standard have evolved in several flavours.

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Who invented RSS?
Bill Kearney gives one of the most lucid explanations of the way-too-personal reactions to RSS.
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Creative destruction

According to economist Joseph Schumpeter, creative destruction is the dissembling and discarding of the old, established -- albeit currently successful -- ways of doing things before there is perceptible pressure to do so." Paul Willax, a professor of entrepreneurship, acknowledges that performance innovation is essential, but insists that it isn't enough. "While it will help make a business better at what it is doing, in this day and age the real key to competitive survival involves doing something very, very different."

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Paul Willax -- "Innovation requires creative destruction of old ways"
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Network effects

"Network effects" occur when tools and services get more valuable as more people use them. Telephones, fax machines and email are the most obvious examples but network effects drive many successful businesses. New users pick Microsoft Office because it is what most employers want to know, and the more people who use the Office file formats, the easier it is to share documents. Thus, network effects don't just bring you new customers, they make what you sell more valuable to old and new customers alike.

Tim O'Reilly thinks that is the key for open source and Internet businesses. "What really matters is the architecture of systems: open source is ultimately about systems that create and manage and magnify network effects."

That means if you design the system right, you won't need to to the hard work yourself: your users and partners will do it for you. Not because you are paying them (like Yahoo's editors) or out of the goodness of their hearts (like Wikipedia editors) but as a side effect of what they're doing for their own self-interested reasons.

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Mary Branscombe -- "Share and ye shall find" in The Guardian Inside IT, June 24, 2004.
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orphan works

U.S. copyright law that have created a large class of "orphan works" -- creative works which are out of print and no longer commercially available, but which are still regulated by copyright. Examples abound.

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Kahle v. Ashcroft -- "Submission site"

Top 10 Merriam-Webster Words of 2004

M-W -- Here are the ten words entered the most often at the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:

1. defenestration
2. serendipity
3. onomatopoeia
4. discombobulate
5. plethora
6. callipygian
7. juxtapose
8. persnickety
9. kerfuffle
10. flibbertigibbet

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Posted by Bernie Goldbach. x_ref125ws
Merriam Webster -- "2004 Top 10 Favorite Words"