As the pressure increases to come up with new internet technologies and stay ahead of the crowd, some are resorting to relabelling a package of existing technologies, and inventing non-existent words to-boot. Is this a modern parable of our times?
In the beginning there was the world. And all was good with the world, for man knew only one tongue, and it was a simple tongue, in which an apple was called an apple, and a rock was called a rock. And there was much rejoicing for many millennia.
And then a great man known as Berners-Lee brought forth the World Wide Web, a man of science whose motives were academic but whose actions caused a great effect on the ordinary people of the world, bringing light and faith and modem connections to the masses. And so it happened that the words Internet, World Wide Web, SGML, hypertext, TCP/IP, HTTP, e-mail, and more besides enriched the tongue of man and he was very happy. But the Internet required much skill to navigate, and the people were restless with desire to discover information, so it came to pass that a group of followers of Berners-Lee saw that order must be created where none existed, and came together in peace and joyous co-operation to form the W3C. And the W3C flourished, and further offered man many hundreds of new words, such as HTML, CSS, WAI, DOM, Web Services, XForm, Semantic Web and Usability.
And man was less impressed, but accepted the new tongue and studied it. By now many followers had gathered into a group which came to be known as the Web Services Industry, and were enthused by the excitement of the new words, and resolved to create more words than ever. And when a new path was forged, one name was no longer enough to satisfy the followers, and words materialised like raindrops falling from the sky. Blog, blogosphere, blogroll, trackback, blogathy, blogistan, flame, meme, and permalink all appeared, and man was hesitant, but embraced the emboldened tongue and was joyful.
And soon a new group of followers arrived, calling themselves 'Marketing professionals' and they spoke of convergence, remoting, angels, blamestorming, below-the-fold, bricks-and-clicks, collaboratory, courseware, d-commerce, viral, fusion, gingerbread house, interoperability, microcontent, offshoring, inshoring, nearshoring, on-demand, opt-in and spamdexing. And Man was duly impressed, but confused, as the Marketing Professionals spoke in tongues he did not understand, and the new words did not seem to refer to anything that was new or exciting.
But despite the richness of the new tongue, the Web Services Industry prospered, and the creators of new words became wealthy and were considered wise. And so the followers in the Industry became ambitious, and wanted their own words. But the soil was less fertile, for everything had a name, and so the followers took names and combined them, and made new names for the union of existing things, and brought forth LAMP and AJAX and even AFLAX. But Man was rightly suspicious, and felt the power of the Marketing Professionals at work, but adopted the new words because they were simpler than the old ones.
And in the end Man surveyed the richness of the tongue, and said "I shall invent one more word, and it shall be 'neologism'". And this word was used by Man to describe the practice of inventing new words. And man was joyful.
We don't invent new words, we just build great software. And while we understand all the internet jargon, we won't try and use it on you. That's why businesses who are taking the internet seriously choose Assanka.