Each year I
identify the Top Internet Jargon of the Year, the Top Internet Acronym of the
Year, the worthy terms that made the Top 10 List, and 5 online trends to look
for in the coming year.
The Internet
term of 2018 is brain hacking, and the Top Internet Acronym of the Year is NSFW
– Not Safe For Work; the rest of the list includes: clap back, co-working,
FIRE, woke, lawnmower parent, QAnon, #TFA and blockchain. Check it out! HOW
MANY HAVE YOU HEARD OF?
Everyone's
talking tech this year, from POTUS to Congress and Millennials to Big Tech.
Here are the Top 10 Internet Terms for 2018. Explanations of the linked terms
are on NetLingo.com:
1. brain hacking - 2018
Jargon of the Year, big
tech is hooking us by making smartphones a habit, even Silicon Valley is
ditching their devices due to Internet addiction,
digital detox and
child tech
addiction. ADULTS: Please take this 8-question quiz, and for your KIDS: please ask them this 12-question quiz. The term "brain hacking" comes from hijacking peoples' minds to form a habit and
it specifically refers to the way Silicon Valley is engineering smartphones, apps and social media to get us hooked, and to
get you and your family to feel the need to check in constantly. You know when
you're on a mobile social media site and you pull
down on the news feed to get it to refresh, and
you see that little circle scrolling clockwise... that's called the pull-down refresh and the guy who
invented it, is sorry he did because people are now addicted. Read the full story here.
2. NSFW - 2018 Acronym of the
Year "Not Safe For Work" from post-#MeToo movements to celebrities
tweeting “NSFW headlines” it inspired the new book “NSFW:
The Little Black Book of Acronyms”
3. clap back - If Oxford’s word
is toxic, then the twitterverse
is clapping back… it’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s never been used more than NOW
as influencers continue
to perfect the art of the clapback, thx Ja Rule
4. co-working – sharing
workplaces, it’s a millennial
trend with co-living
and co-sharing;
working in the industry and living in urban areas is impacting people’s lives
and creating new business opportunities
5. FIRE – it means
"Financial Independence, Retire Early" bravo to millennial crusaders
who are geeking out
calculating compound interest and blowing up the whole concept of career and
retirement
6. woke – young and old are
becoming aware, like a man who’s a feminist, or a person's awareness of current
affairs, it implies knowledge and empathy as in "You’re woke, so now
things are, you know, real."
7. lawnmower parent
– first tiger,
then elephant, helicopter, dolphin, attachment, free-range,
lawnmowers "mow down" a path for their snowflakes removing all
obstacles that may cause a struggle
8. QAnon – what started as a cryptic post grew into a sprawling
alternative theory about all things fake
9. #TFA – Omarosa said “they'd
just hashtag it ‘TFA’
and move on when Trump did something insane,” it refers to the Twenty Fifth
Amendment, as in the removal of the POTUS in the event of
impairment…
10. blockchain – the muscle
behind bitcoin (which
Scrabble just added) it makes bitcoin transactions secure, reliable, and
anonymous, it fueled a cryptocurrency
craze and helps with ocean plastic too!
Read more
about the bold terms on NetLingo.com and the Top 5 Online Trends to Watch in
2019:
1. deepfake / facial recognition
/ faceprint – OMG
deepfake wait until you see the photo
2. social credit / social scoring / reputation score
– scary stuff from China, wait it’s from big tech too
3. AI / artificial
intelligence / machine
learning / robotics
– unbelievable developments
4. YIMBY & JOMO - Yes In My Back Yard
& Joy Of Missing Out – new attitude (not NIMBY & FOMO)
5. CBD – yes, as in the
oil, it’s not an actual acronym
because it stands for Cannabidiol
The Top 10
Internet Terms of the Year, compiled by Erin
Jansen, founder of NetLingo.com
Subscribe to
the NetLingo Blog via Email or RSS here
Follow @netlingo on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook
Please copy and distribute! Our purpose is to educate and
entertain :)
Brain Hacking – Top Internet Term of 2018: Big Tech Gets Us Addicted
DatingNews.com: Get "NSFW" to Decode Flirtatious Slang for Sexty Singles
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQFY7CY_In3mgpkuPcQFe38fIm7vODdyJkLgYy0biRoBz9jCTMzyFBcjWxI8zDkBSZzVW78w-xzTmBQWp-gD46AVdCurhTSiwIH-2pqYXJQ87rmr83ZeBRxqpzUlLrbzdSKs_SUQ/s1600/NSFW_NetLingo_DatingNews_feature.jpg)
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![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDnT_EPXwppNsZjWSu-7-uwQeq1T7U6-EsgZuCwXomEBMcr8Ld27sV8bwLcFnfI6FKlpYRZzH8UaRdsQ2uq5hDLzf4k_5nn-d8pR82uA8Dn6VpPd0WeNPMDqayGw8MXfRO7pIJbA/s200/bighug.png)
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSv04pCjzfI7ZlT32XmXSFyeJJ2OfV-ILLKiidmvrEYidWacFD__zxScBLHEUXSta1mleX-_k35ff_VyEWdoJoj9qXrvhqkGa_CSZRvOhMrSS9u9NqG7Kpym2lrKw_LO2xtpPI4g/s200/Busted-NSFW.png)
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMniGRaXrT6sxGvjVhyNF44SwVkwI2k3wiYiHTeGZcW6b4ioEHdvNMUzyPxLPvNNC4dK59U6QHeJcTwzfFO56KgzDlk_1VMN1L0qDFvCjJodtlkINVZAiQ0zMy7azocQyCt9FNaw/s1600/NSFW-on-tablet.jpg)
Hayley is the Editor-in-Chief of DatingNews, and she handles editorial schedules, interviews, social media, and partnerships, among other things. She's been in the dating industry for more than six years, and her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Bustle, Cosmo, the Huffington Post, AskMen, and Entrepreneur.
Whether They’re Naughty or Nice, NetLingo has Your Holiday Gifts Covered
Sex Sells. Let’s A/B Test that Puppy and See Who Bites
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WTF? He Told You the Motive on Social Media: No More “Hopes and Prayers”
Big Tech has a Saudi Arabia Problem: Apple's Hypocrisy
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Investment in Saudi Arabia will prove controversial for Apple. With its draconian form of sharia law, Saudi Arabia’s autocratic government is consistently rated among “the worst of the worst” human rights offenders. Its gender apartheid system treats women as second-class citizens, shrouded in fabric, dependent on male chaperones, and barred from going out alone and from any form of public life. The country has notoriously strict anti-LGBT laws as opposed to Apple's pro-LGBT stances in the U.S. and elsewhere. There’s no freedom of religion. The press is censored. They're covering up the killing of one of their own nationals in their own embassy, allegedly sawing his limbs off and desolving him in acid. Brutal, public floggings and stonings are the penalty for committing adultery. Those arrested are routinely tortured to extract confessions. They've jailed the country's elite inside the Ritz Carlton, for years. Last year, Saudi Arabia put to death 146 people for crimes including murder and drug dealing; most of the executions were beheadings. Not to mention the U.S.-backed military campaign in neighboring Yemen which is killing thousands and putting millions of people at risk of starvation, including whatever else we don't know...? It's not worth it.
China is Beating Us at Our Own AI Game = Not Good for Your Grandkids
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgciROV9cG4p6vZEw3jLP2lP2PEF4SsUWmQetOEwqP3gByn2r2XhFh7LuIRovr9V8L0KdLI4uC0NZuGp0x8HyxXl0NhjYDTWSW3cn33URoYc_KLUsm3PYm10bl5q5TRwpHzKNBvsQ/s1600/china-usa-ai.jpg)
Facebook’s Gone FUD: Why Big Tech Needs Regulation
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvdu3PT0RWNvt6l0ua_DkTiTReD59uGo0x_On3IlpwICUVDvvSzxNVQO3KeN-V1vrw2y3IFhJAMmSk98JHmxHiViAMB8YwdgFtaLnhRxGxR5ubZxJQZKhJaSQlCa8uzRWLO90ZLw/s1600/fb-hacked-need-GDPR.jpg)
Google Hid their Hack for 7 months: That's Evil
So, Google can get hacked just like the rest of them – but they don’t want you to know it. That’s what we found out this week when they shut down Google+ (their failing social network) because of “a glitch” that gave outside developers would-be access to 500,000+ private profiles. This kind of headline has become so common that people hardly pay attention to privacy data issues anymore, but we must! Google does... there's a reason they hid the compromising SNAFU from the government, and everybody else, for 7 whole months.
Why did they hide? Because they feared it would draw “immediate regulatory interest.” Well they’re right! Hello Congress, this time they told it to you themselves, in your kind of English: They covered up this data breach for 28 weeks, with no concern for their users’ private information, because they didn’t want to get “immediate regulatory interest.” Maybe you’ll understand the NetLingo word for it: data Valdez.
The privacy breach alone is one thing but this kind of cover up used to be damaging to a company. Even though they are reporting that it was “just email addresses and birth dates,” that kind of data gets put into algorithms that can identify specific people to target for identity theft. If data breaches are run of the mill for the masses, then maybe Google’s cover up will finally jar action from the classes. Dear Mr. President, please tell the FCC to make an 8th floor decision and launch an investigation to find out what else Google isn’t telling us.
- Erin Jansen, Internet Specialist, Social Psychologist, Founder of NetLingo.com
Forced to "Go Responsive" In Response to Big Tech
It’s called Responsive Website Design, or in webmaster lingo simply RWD, and it’s the new breed of website you’ve likely been seeing that “responds automatically” to your screen size. Basically, websites like NetLingo can overlay a little code to take our same robust content and make it easily viewable on all different kinds of screen sizes, whether it’s your smaller smartphone, medium size tablet, or larger size desktop. Check it out: NetLingo.com - on any of your devices, even the ads look good!
This latest design was considered “critical” because the truth is, as an online small business owner, you are always having to upgrade. I had created a nice, clean, SEO-optimized .mobi site back in day to fill the mobile browsing demand, but ultimately that wasn’t good enough for Big Tech. When Google announced “Mobilegeddon” in 2015 and started to boost the ratings of sites that are mobile friendly if the search was made from a mobile device, then “mobile first” became the new mantra. It’s understandable, especially since the amount of mobile traffic for the first time accounted for more than half of total Internet traffic, but here was another instance of Google forcing tech-savviness upon millions business owners in order to primarily service their search needs and their mobile search results.
My website started out as a flat HTML site and then got converted to a database-driven site and then upgraded to a LAMP stack site, and has now evolved into a full-blown Responsive Web Design site… and Big Tech forced my hand each upgrade all along the way. Even though NetLingo.com remains on the leading edge of website content and technology, apparently in this day and age, leading edge is no longer good enough… there’s even a NetLingo word for it: bleeding edge.
So, is this another instance where Congress should be seriously looking into Google’s monopoly and business practices if we want to remain a country where small business really matters? YES. But Congress doesn’t seem to understand Internet technology, let alone the implications. Who other than lobbyists is informing Congress about these matters and why is it taking Congress so long to make any decisions regarding Internet oversight?
Congress still hasn’t figured out the Secure Federal File Sharing Act (H.R. 4098), which would prohibit the use of P2P software on government computers and networks. I’m sorry but this bill has been under review by the United States Senate since March 25, 2010 meanwhile new botnets spread most rapidly via peer-to-peer communication. If my team and I didn’t make a decision for 8 years we’d get fired… and then hacked, or in their parlance “meddled with.” That's not good enough.
C’mon Congress. Of course, many small businesses want more and better mobile search results but does Big Tech have a right to make the millions of small business owners keep upgrading when they could possibly make a few changes on their end that would in turn benefit us all? United States citizens have been naïve in counting on Congress to care about Big Tech’s impact on small business owners. When you're ready for me to come to Washington and explain the implications of peer-to-peer networking, Google’s monopoly, or anything else Internet-related, I’m on the first plane.
- Erin Jansen, Internet Specialist, Social Psychologist, Founder of NetLingo.com
Internet Taxes are Inevitable :( Why BERNIE and BEZOS are at WAR
Under this Sanders plan, if an Amazon employee receives $300 in food stamps, Amazon would be taxed $300. Great idea Bernie! Make Bezos and Big Tech pay, but better still, help Congress wake up. If 1 in 3 Amazon employees in Arizona receive food stamps and you recognize these workers need this type of help, Congress should also see the bigger picture that companies like Amazon are getting rich off of low worker wages and instead paying high shareholder returns. We now know that if Lowe’s, CVS, and Home Depot wouldn’t have “bought back their own stock” they could have provided each of their workers a raise of $18,000 a year; Starbucks could have given each of its employees $7,000 a year; and McDonald’s could have given $4,000 to each of its nearly 2 million employees. The workers would rather have a raise than food stamps! Yes, we all want to be rich like Jeff, but not with taxpayer subsidies.
Why does Amazon get a subsidy “cost of aid, hand-out” like this in the first place anyway --and then not have to pay it back-- when millions of small businesses are trying to compete with no assistance from the government at all? While Congress couldn't figure out who should get an online sales tax, Bezos was allowed to build Amazon through un-taxed revenue and low-wage employees, but every other brick and mortar store across America was obligated to pay, for 21 years and counting.
Who should get the Internet tax: Should it be the state where it was shipped FROM (sold) or the state where the product was sent TO (purchased). C'mon Congress, is that so difficult? Make a decision. The online buyer, where the product is shipped TO and where the product is USED, gets the sales tax. All those years of taxes could have been helping to rebuild this country. Or look at it this way: Due to a low 5.46% sales tax in Wyoming and a high 10.02% sales tax in Louisiana, Amazon was able to charge 5 to 10% less for any product in America even before the small business discounted their product. Yes, Amazon is responsible for the demise of the sole proprietorship, there's even a NetLingo word for it: you've been Amazonned.
So, is Sanders right in asking Congress to seriously look into Amazon’s monopoly and business practices if we want to remain a country where small business really matters? YES. In fact, where is Congress in any of this? Why did you not foresee the loss of revenue to the States and the economic burden ahead when Bezos and pals began profiting from hiring mostly part-time employees that would not be eligible for the ever-rising health care costs? Smells like lobbyists to me.
Bravo Bernie, the 77-year-old Senator from Vermont, who is leading the charge with his Stop BEZOS Act. It’s long overdue but face it, Internet taxes are inevitable. Restoring the American dream and supporting a middle class should not mean subsidies from Congress. No to subsidies, yes to a living wage! Amazon's decision this week to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour means Bernie Sanders' strategy is, so far, working magnificently. Et tu Congress?
- Erin Jansen, Internet Specialist, Social Psychologist, Founder of NetLingo.com
Our President, the Google Narcissist
Does Google rig search results? You bet it does! The Trump administration wants to regulate Google because Trump claims Google rigs search results. Well of course they do! That’s their business Mr. President, but not in the way you think. Google’s search algorithms are the secret sauce of their revenue, which last year amounted to $109.65 billion US dollars. Rigging search results is what makes them the dominant search engine in the market.
I’ve been tracking Internet trends since 1994 when the Web browser was first commercially released and take it from me, search engine algorithms have not only changed, they’ve gotten worse. Back then, a business owner could navigate through the various meta-tags and keyword policies that helped you boost your business listing. But now, Google makes 500-600 new algorithm updates in one year alone, and the small business owner has no way of keeping up unless they pay an SEO firm or fork out mega-dollars to Google for paid search results - which they created to push the other organic business listings further down.
The dream of a website used to be you could hang your shingle right next to the biggest corporation and still be seen, or at least get traffic by your own creative means. Now you’re one SEO tweak away from your blog or website tumbling down to the bottom of their search results never to be found again… I mean who really clicks after the first 2-3 result pages anyway?
So, is Google a monopoly that Congress should be seriously looking into if we want to remain a country where small business really matters? YES. Ask any small business owner if they feel overwhelmed by all the technology upgrades needed nowadays and then add search engine optimization spreadsheets and paid advertising dashboards to the mix, and they’ll tell you it’s a hot mess.
Face it, technology has outpaced our culture. It would seem a paradox because it all started out being a good thing: Google set up specific formulas to help promote business listings and champion free speech, however they’ve devolved into the corporate greed culture where the only thing that matters is money. Quarterly profits and stock prices are the gods they worship. They quietly removed the “Don’t Be Evil” clause from their code of conduct in May (!) and last month announced they are building a secret censored search engine in China which would block websites that are banned by the government and would not answer certain blacklisted questions. But they’ll all still make money, and their “answer boxes” will continue to divert website traffic away from small businesses thereby siphoning off even more of our online revenue dollars.
Rigging search results is only one example of Google’s monopoly, in fact there are MANY reasons why Google and other Big Tech companies should be investigated for anti-trust behavior (which I intend to explain one at a time). But we must also make sure Congress understands all of this Internet technology too (because quite frankly, it’s embarrassing to realize how our elected officials are so behind the digital times).
The real reason Trump’s administration is taking action is because he’s been ego-surfing! Trump has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and he’s concerned about HIS search results. He believes Google manipulates its search results to prominently display negative stories about HIM. There’s even a NetLingo word for it: Google narcissist. The fact is Mr. President, you just have a lot of negative news; right idea, wrong motive. You bet Google is rigging the system… for all of us… are we naïve in counting on Congress to care?
- Erin Jansen, Internet Specialist, Social Psychologist, Founder of NetLingo.com
Technology is Outpacing Culture
Dear Friends of NetLingo,
Due to the recent events of this crazy world and the random characters in it, I am re-activating the NetLingo blog because I've decided I can no longer stay quiet and watch Big Tech and Congress duel it out with so little input from Us: the Public, the Everyman, the Individual, the Business Owner, the Citizen.
I invite you to join me in my editorial journey as I continue to explain and comment on the important Tech Issues In The News today and how it impacts our lives. Thank you for your continued support.
See you online,
Erin