A new study has found that the words “blog” and “wiki” tend to make people upset, as do “cookie” and “netiquette.” To be honest, I’m not sure what we – the owners of blogs, the users of wikis – are supposed to do with this information. But there you have it.
The study was conducted by YouGov, a British market research agency. Want to argue that the agency’s employees aren’t pros? Well, they are. That they interviewed a crummy sample? 2,091 adults participated, and YouGov works with groups that are “carefully selected and controlled” such that they are “representative of the adult population as a whole.”
We can’t even suggest that YouGov’s respondents aren’t Internet-savvy, because all of the firm’s polling is done online.
And so, as reported by the AFP, “Topping the list of words most likely to make web users ‘wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard’ was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.
“‘Blogosphere’ . . . was second; ‘blog’ itself was third; ‘netiquette’, or Internet etiquette, came fourth and ‘blook’, a book based on a blog, was fifth,” the article continues. “‘Cookie’ . . . came in ninth, while ‘wiki’ . . . was tenth.”
So, should we wind back the clock and revive terms like “web log”? I hope not, though I’ll admit that some people seem a little too ready to whip out Internet-specific terms. Keep writing your blogs, then, and reading Wikipedia. But you may want to reconsider talking to your pals about these things.
