By Leslie Walker
Thursday, April 13, 2006; D01
Quick, name this era -- the one the Internet is in right now.
"The Living Web," a Newsweek cover story proclaimed last week. "The Lego era," a New York Times article called it. Both compete with "Web 2.0," a phrase that peppers the conversations of geeks and venture capitalists involved in Web development.
This game of coining names for still-emerging technologies is getting out of hand. Since I'm not sure there is any such thing as "Web 2.0" or the "Living Web," I fear these neologisms are having the ironic effect of making it harder for people to understand what's really happening in an industry central to their lives.
This particular naming impulse is an attempt to capture many trends in one term -- the latest flavor of Web software, the creative new ways people are communicating and socializing online, and the fresh wave of start-ups offering new online services -- at time when the Internet is still evolving.
I first heard software engineers use "Web 2.0" to describe an emerging type of software in 2003, but its meaning was broadened after technology publisher Tim O'Reilly adopted the phrase and made it the title of an industry conference in October 2004.
If I had a nickel for every "Web 2.0" product pitch I've received since then, I could retire rich right now. It's frustrating, because I believe that behind "Web 2.0" are many important milestones in Internet evolution.
To be clear, my beef is with the idea of using one term to cover the whole shebang of what's happening online, not with the labels being hung on individual phenomena such as blogs and podcasts. I think those words provide useful mental handles for us all to grab hold of as new behaviors sweep the Internet.
But any way you look at it, this frenzy of linguistic creation is making it hard for people over 30 to keep up, much less senior citizens like my 85-year-old father. I knew cyber-lingo was spiraling out of control when he looked across the dinner table at me recently and asked, "What's the difference between a blog and a social network?"
Mind you, my media-addicted dad has never read a blog, much less written one, and his social network consists mainly of his Rotary Club. But he mastered the "blog" word a few years ago and was determined to do the same with this newer phrase he'd been hearing on TV, "social networking."
I told him I hated the phrase and then took a stab at illustrating it by describing the Internet's most popular "social-networking" hangout, MySpace, where people maintain blogs and link them into personal networks.
"Young people create personal-profile pages and publish photos and commentary there about themselves, Pop," I ventured. "Then they make connections with friends by adding links to their profiles on their own pages."
As Pop nodded, I realized we have entered a frustrating period when Internet buzzwords are flooding mainstream media way too fast. It's interesting how every new buzzword seems to take less time to go mainstream than previous ones, thanks to some of the very same publishing tools to which the terms refer.
Out of curiosity, I checked to see when various Internet phrases caught on by searching the LexisNexis news archive, which includes more than a thousand newspapers, magazines, newsletters and TV show transcripts.
"Instant messaging" and its abbreviation, IM, seemed to take five or six years to go mainstream, judging by how frequently "instant message" or "instant messaging" appeared in articles stored in the Lexis archive. They had dozens of mentions in 1994 and 1995, but neither merited 1,000 annual mentions in Lexis until 1999.
Blog took only about three years to go mainstream. "Web log" was shortened to "blog" about six years ago, yielding a catchy word for the outpouring of personal writing at Web sites functioning as virtual private printing presses. In 2000, "blog" merited 52 mentions in Lexis, some unrelated to the Web. The word popped up in mainstream media in 2001, when it appeared 190 times in news articles. That jumped to 940 references in 2002 and 4,742 in 2003. No wonder Merriam-Webster Inc. declared blog "word of the year" in 2004, when it was the single most looked-up term at the dictionary publisher's site.
Podcast -- an amalgamation of iPod and broadcast referring to audio files people post online for downloading and playing on iPods -- leapt into our lexicon even faster. The terms "podcast" and "podcasting" showed no mentions in Lexis for 2003, appeared 80 times in 2004 and then got hammered into the public consciousness with 8,859 media references last year.
Next came "vlog," a contraction of video and blog coined to describe the homemade videos people started posting on their blogs. It crept into mainstream media last year with 219 mentions in Lexis. Based on its usage in recent months, I expect it will rate more than 1,000 news references this year.
Now blogs, podcasts and vlogs are expanding into unfamiliar terrain as people combine them with other Internet tools and explore novel ways to share the resulting material. Once again we are struggling for language to describe the new things people are doing online. Words fail us as we try to tell pals about the material we just edited at the open encyclopedia Wikipedia, the thoughts we posted about a stranger's home video at video-sharing site YouTube, the ratings we gave news stories at Digg, or the music annotations we shared at TagWorld.
That's where "Web 2.0" beckons. Pundits are seizing on it as a convenient term to describe everything happening online, especially new social behaviors involving user participating and sharing. But even if the Web needed an umbrella phrase, how long would the 2.0 moniker serve a useful purpose?
I have no doubt young people are already using their so-called 2.0 Web tools to fashion 3.0 and 4.0 versions, which will emerge any day now from dorm rooms and garages everywhere.
By any word, that's the way of the Web.
Leslie Walker welcomes e-mail atwalkerl@washpost.com.