Bacronyms

Perhaps you have heard of bacronyms (also spelled backronym) . This word breezed onto my radar screen about a year ago but at the time it didn't stick. I came across the term again this week while I worked on a wiki project.

Bacronym has multiple meanings, but the one I find interesting describes the case where a word is turned into an acronym by creating a phrase out of the letters in the word. Here are two examples.

SOS was chosen as a distress signal because the Morse code is unmistakable and easy to transmit. Three dots, three dashes, and three dots. SOS was never meant to mean save our ship, save our souls, or send out succor. These are bacronyms.

Wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning quick or fast. Wiki has been adopted by web designers to describe a simplified mark up language. It permits anyone who accesses a wiki web site to contribute or modify content. The most prominent example of a wiki in action is Wikipedia. Some have claimed that wiki is an acronym standing for "what I know is." Wiki is a word, "what I know is" represents a bacronym.

Bacronyms are an interesting language phenomenon. If you know of others, feel free to share them here.

Tag Clouds

Tag clouds provide information about information. A tag cloud, also called a word cloud, presents a visual image of words on a Web site or tags used to describe entries on a Web site.

An alphabetical list from Flickr shows us that wedding, london, and travel are very popular categories on this photo sharing site. The larger the word, the more entries there are with that tag.

LibraryThing http://www.librarything.com/tagcloud.php provides an image of the keywords that members have assigned to the books they enter into the Web site. Each word in the cloud is a hyperlink, so you can click on the word and see the related entries.

Info pros can take advantage of tools like this to enhance products and services. Information aggregators such as Factiva deliver tag clouds through Search 2.0. A search on oil prices yielded a word cloud revealing connections to other topics in the news such as tropical storm Fay.

Are you including information about information in your products and services? If so, feel free to share your ideas and views with other Info Biz readers.

Image Generators

Here's a question for info pros who deliver value added research results in the form of electronic documents. Have you ever included content created by an image generator? I've been experimenting with these tools, and it seems like we have an opportunity here.

Since the concept is new to me, I haven't had a chance to try out my idea. I have created a couple of images, and it's really pretty cool. Here's one I made just for fun using Badge Maker at Big Huge Labs http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/


There are other image generators like ImageChef http://www.imagechef.com/
and CustomSignGenerator http://www.customsigngenerator.com/.

Once I've had a chance to use this concept in a client report, I'll post something here and let you know how it goes. In the meantime, for those of you who are one step ahead, how have you used an image generator to enhance a deliverable?

Flickr vs Picassa and Furl vs. Delicious

Over the last few weeks I've been participating in a professional development program called 23Things. The idea is to expose info pros to a wide variety of technologies so that we can adapt them as needed to our various work situations. (SLA members will want to check the organization web site to see what the program offers.)

The program introduces Flickr as a useful image sharing site and Delicious as a social bookmarking tool. This is all well and good. I have learned a lot and dutifully progressed through the prescribed exercises. The trouble is, I had already been using Picassa for images and FURL for bookmarking.

I can't help but feel a bit torn and fragmented. Which is better? Why did the 23Things people pick Flickr over Picassa and Delicious over FURL? Granted, they have different functionality and assorted pros and cons. My beef is that now I have some pictures uploaded to Flickr and others on Picassa. My bookmarks are split between FURL and Delicious.

Ultimately I will pick one and go with it. In the meantime, however, I'm experiencing some kind of multiple personality syndrome.

Del.icio.us Becomes Delicious

Well, no sooner do I blog about the virtues of Del.icio.us for social bookmarking than the powers that be implement substantial changes. First, Del.icio.us became Delicious.com. Frankly, that's a good move. It's easier and a whole lot more straight forward.

The Web site looks different and it boasts a faster search function. You can still post, share, and organize bookmarks. Also, you can access your bookmarks from any computer with Internet access. So, if you haven't tried Delicious yet, this looks like just the right time to give it a go.