NetLingo Top 10 Internet Words of 2010


NetLingo.com announces the Top 10 Internet Words of 2010! There has been a huge emphasis on numbers this year so we decided to feature multiple terms within one expression. Listed in no particular order and chosen for their popularity, here are the Top 10 Internet Words of 2010 according to NetLingo.com:

1. leetspeak (1337) - a coded language replacing letters with other keyboard characters
2. 143, 1432, 459, 831 - means I love you
3. 182 - it means I hate you
4. 9, 99, H9, W9 - code to alert another computer user that someone is watching you
5. 53X, 8, CU46, LH6 - it means sex, oral sex, see you for sex, and let’s have sex
6. 10Q - it means thank you
7. LOL - most popular use means "Laughing Out Loud," not as popular is "Lots Of Love"
8. digitally grounded - a modern form of punishment that forbids use of electronic devices
9. cyberbullying - being bullied online by peers became a serious health concern this year
10. zerg - in gaming it is to outnumber the other team, in life it means to gang up on someone

Did you know most of these? If not, it’s time to get with the program! Make one of your New Year's resolutions to learn more lingo and sign up for our Word of the Day newsletters and subscribe to our blog and RSS feeds.
Happy New Year 2011 everyone!
HHTYAY,
Erin



Happy Thanksgiving from cyberspace

Happy Thanksgiving America, are you really going to spend it in front of the boob tube or waste it in cyberspace? Here's a quote by author William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace, "Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. That makes Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did before. Empires and nation-states had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn't consitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species." - As seen in The Week

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First Engrish, then Euro-English, and now Singlish

In world news, Singapore is urging its people to speak standard English instead of "Singlish," the city-state's unique patois. Singlish, which employs English words in a framework of Chinese grammar, is the one language that Singapore’s ethnic Chinese, Malays, and Tamils share in common, but authorities worry that the dialect is hampering business and tourism. "We need to remain relevant to the world," said government minister Vivian Balakrishnan. She said the government would soon put up posters giving proper English versions of common Singlish phrases. "Got problem call me can," for example, translates as "Please let me know if you need help." See also: Engrish - As seen in The Week

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If you use Verizon, check your bill!

Verizon copped to overcharges and will offer customer refunds. FYI: Verizon announced last month that it would reimburse millions of customers who had overpaid for Internet access, said John Sutter in CNN.com. Verizon blamed a defect in its mobile phone software that “caused at least 15 million customers to be charged data fees, even if they didn’t subscribe to data plans.” Refunds of $2 to $6 will appear in subscribers’ bills in October and November. Consumer activists faulted Verizon for a lengthy delay in correcting the overcharges, which were first reported in 2009. The total amount rebated could reach $90 million. - As seen in The Week

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Did you hear the one about...? And other dumb Facebook stories!

I know many of you use Facebook on a regular basis, in fact the NetLingo blog posts get automatically streamed to the NetLingo Facebook Page so it's a great way to stay informed. Since I regularly write about what NOT to do on social networking sites like Facebook --did you see the "5 Guidelines if You're Gonna Facebook It" post-- there's no excuse for you to make the same crazy mistakes I read about in the news!

Case in point, did you hear about the school board official who posted attacks on homosexuals on his Facebook page? C'mon dude, not only is this bad behavior but it's also downright stupid. Apparently Clint McCance never considered empathy, let alone his digital footprint. The school board member resigned from Midland School District last week after he used his Facebook page to encourage "queers" and "fags" to kill themselves. What? Turns out he wrote a series of posts in response to a campaign called "Wear Purple Day," which was meant to show solidarity with gay youths in the wake of a spate of suicides connected to cyberbullying. I don't even want to reprint what he said, it's that bad. If you're curious, read more here.

And how about the story of the woman who got fired because she posted criticism of her boss on her Facebook page? Even though I empathize with her more than the authorities who fired her, it reminds me of the dooce story and is still a lesson in what NOT to do! Turns out this story could have far reaching implications: The National Labor Relations Board announced last week that it had filed a complaint against an ambulance company for firing a worker after she criticized her boss on her personal Facebook page. Board officials said Dawnmarie Souza, an emergency medical technician in Hartford, Connecticut, was fired after posting sarcastic remarks on Facebook about her supervisor at American Medical Response. The company said Souza had violated a policy barring employees from depicting the company "in any way" on social media sites. Lafe Solomon, the National Labor Relations Board acting general counsel said "Employees have protection under the law to talk to each other about conditions at work." Labor lawyers said the conflict has the makings of a landmark case that may help define the rights of workers in the new frontier of social media.

In other far reaching news, if you're planning on climbing Mount Everest anytime soon, you'll now be able to text us and Facebook your journey all the way to the top. Ncell, a Nepali telecom firm, constructed a new facility allowing climbers of the world's tallest mountain to make cell phone calls, send videos, and access the Internet all the way to 29,035 feet!

Back on the ground, did anyone notice the fact that numerous candidates running for the House and Senate this past election had to contend with old photos, circulated via Facebook or the Internet, that captured them in embarrassing situations? Again I will say, what were they thinking!? Several photos appeared during the campaigns including a man dressing like a Nazi and another simulating sex acts with a toy. ID10T.

Finally, it seems the Wakefield Track and Field team adults don't read NetLingo. The Massachusetts high school handed out shirts with the team's initials, "WTF." School officials said they were unaware of the initials' meaning in online jargon (as in "What The F***")... someone please forward them a clue! Tell them they can subscribe to free NetLingo word of the day, acronym of the day, and blog posts here :-)

How to make time slow down, really!

Looks like I'll be moving to another high-rise! In his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein put forth a very strange idea: Time moves faster or slower depending on how fast you’re moving and the strength of the gravitational field around you. Subsequent experiments proved Einstein right: Time ticks slightly slower on a fast-moving satellite compared with a stationary one, while a clock in the mountains--farther from Earth’s gravitational field--runs faster than one at sea level.

The same weirdness applies at a more intimate scale, but only now have scientists been able to measure it. Using a pair of ultra-precise atomic clocks, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology demonstrated that a clock raised just a foot above the floor ticks marginally slower than the lower one--by a difference of about 90 billionths of a second over 79 years. In a second experiment, they found that a clock moving at as little as 20 mph ticks ever so slightly slower than a nonmoving clock. "People tend to just ignore relativistic effects, but relativistic effects are everywhere," NIST’s James Chin-Wen Chou tells ScienceNews.org. The effects, however, are rather subtle: Over a lifetime, people who live at the top of a skyscraper age about 100 millionths of a second more slowly than people on the ground floor.

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No message is worth dying for :-(

Having spent the summer in a state that has not yet passed any texting laws, let alone hands-free cell phone laws, I came to fear for my life at the hands of multitasking, mini-van soccer moms speeding past me completely unaware. For the good of us all, it’s time for the kind of aggressive police crackdown that was mounted against drunken-driving a generation ago, said Michael Fumento in the Los Angeles Times. “No message is worth dying for.”

“Border collie jill surveying the view from atop sand dune.” Those, said Michael Fumento, were the last words typed into a cell phone by Malibu, Calif., plastic surgeon Frank Ryan, just before he drove his Jeep Wrangler off a cliff in August. May he rest in peace. He was just one of thousands of motorists who’ve lost their lives while typing out messages in recent years, most of whose last words are not known. But we do know, from these tragedies and numerous studies, that texting while driving is far more dangerous than driving while drunk. One study by Car and Driver found that a test driver who was legally drunk took 4 feet farther to come to a full stop when confronted with an emergency; the same driver stopped 36 feet farther when reading an e-mail, and 70 feet when sending a text. Yet few states truly enforce their texting laws or laws banning talking on hand-held phones. - As seen in The Week

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Toasted Skin Syndrome: When Laptops Singe

The latest health scare in the tech world? Your laptop. “Toasted skin syndrome’’ generally disappeared around the time people stopped spending hours huddled close to a potbelly stove. But the syndrome is now cropping up again, in young people who spend hours a day with laptop computers on their legs, says the Associated Press. Toasted skin syndrome is a rare skin condition characterized by “sponge-patterned skin discoloration,” and it’s caused by long-term exposure to heat. Cases are now popping up in the medical literature, including a Virginia law student who toasted her leg while having her laptop propped on her lap six hours a day. The temperature underneath registered 125 degrees. Another case involved a young man who played computer games for hours a day; his left thigh, where he balanced the laptop, turned brown and mottled, while the right did not. The discoloration may be permanent, and researchers say laptop users who won’t give up the habit should at least place a carrying case or other heat shield under their devices. Uh, duh. - As seen in The Week

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Have I taught you nothing about privacy?

If you're a parent, maybe you've already heard about this recent study. I hope so and I hope you've done something about it! For those of you still in the dark, read on... About 92 percent of American babies and toddlers under 2 have their pictures and names posted online (sometimes along with the names of their mothers) on social networking sites such as Facebook, a new study found. Privacy advocates warn that identity thieves may someday exploit this information. Ok everyone, this doesn't mean you can't post pictures of junior to share with your friends and family, it just means you need to take time to learn how to set the privacy settings on your social network of choice so that only the people you know can view the pics. Got it? - As seen in The Week

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Artificial intelligence behind the wheel?

First spotted on the highway almost a year ago, Google is developing a self-driving car. The company’s fleet of self-driving Toyota Priuses have logged a collective 140,000 miles, 1,000 of those with no human intervention, driving the Pacific Coast Highway, Hollywood Boulevard—and even San Francisco’s Lombard Street, reputed to be the most crooked road in the world. Engineers point out that robot cars, unlike humans, don’t drive sleepy, distracted, or drunk. Though years away from mass production, self-driving cars could transform society, Google says, reducing traffic and saving lives. “Can we text twice as much while driving, without the guilt?” said the car’s inventor, Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a Google engineer. “Yes, we can, if only cars will drive themselves.” - As seen in The Week

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Stop the Ban of Facebook in Egypt


In November, I've got a lot of tech news updates coming your way so read on...! Alarmed by opposition groups using Facebook to network, the Egyptian government has launched a propaganda campaign warning people away from the site. One opposition group, called the April 6 Movement, has used Facebook to organize strikes and pro-democracy rallies. Another group, of more than 100,000, uses Facebook to lobby Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed ElBaradei to run for president. On state-run TV, Mona ElSharkawy, the host of the country’s biggest talk show, has called for a ban on the social networking site. She warned viewers against its “evil,” saying it can be used by foreign intelligence agencies to gather information about Egypt. Within days, an Egyptian Facebook group called “Stop the Ban of Facebook in Egypt” had formed, attracting thousands of members. Makes you appreciate the fact that you live in the land of the free and can use Facebook any time you like! -As seen in The Week

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