Word of the day

Today's word is GodTube. According to USA Today, "GodTube offers a wildly popular alternative to YouTube." This is a Christian alternative to YouTube. The goal, according to its founder, Chris Wyatt, is to "help the church get people back into the pews." While this may seem a curious goal for a site which now offers a choice of 38,000 watch-at-home Christian videos, Mr Wyatt is adamant that they also need to rock up to a pew for an in person experience.

I guess that Mr Wyatt is also glad that he got in first with the domain name, since JewTube and IslamicTube have had to settle for the names of religions rather than the divine name that they share. And although we think ourselves to be pretty much out of trademark territory with religious video sites, the Utube Blog (an unofficial blog on YouTube and video sharing) suggests that the name, appearance and features of the GodTube site bear some uncanny resemblances.

Education and Workforce Summit

As some of you may know, I have some involvement with the forthcoming Education and Workforce Summit - in Melbourne, on 27-28 March (just after Easter). We have been refining the issues ever since I became part of the process, and a fraught task it is.

There is now a web page for the Summit, which has a call for contributions. Anyone who is interested in library education in Australia, or the future of the Australian library workforce, is invited to make a submission or comment to the Summit process. The document provides some questions and other information. The agenda for the Summit will be determined by what ALIA members, library employers and educators see as the main issues. We hope to make all submissions and suggestions accessible on the ALIA Summit website, and for that reason there is a limit of 5 pages for submissions.

One of the most common questions asked is: who will be attending the Summit? The capacity of the venue is 50, and we are still working out which 50 will be attending. We aim to ensure effective representation of the three categories of people I mentioned above, but also achieve agreement on a clear plan of action.

Hove a look at the site, and then have your say. The Summit is being organised by ALIA National Office, and you should send your contributions to Sue Hutley.

I will keep you posted. Feel free to post back too.

Word of the day

Today's word is nerd chic, and many thanks to a wide range of commentators on the MetaFilter Community Weblog. In fact, this is a continuation of the post on w00t the other day. So engaged was the MetaFilter community about w00t being word of the year, 14 years after its first use, that one correspondent, Uther Bentrazor said: "I guess I never really thought about it, I always read "w00t" as the nerd-chic version of the way rappers yell "WHAT!" incessantly as an interjection for any number of reasons. "

A discussion here the other day as to whether a term like nerd chic was oxymoronic came loosely to the conclusion "not always". And now I find this quote attributed to David Tennant by Brahmawolf: "Tennent himself has described his look, in refering to his Doctor Who character, as nerd chic. Nerd chic, I think it should be embraced more."

There's still time to define the term. The Urban Dictionary invites authors to propose a definition for this yet undefined term, so have a look here, where the term used is slightly different - nerdy chic.

And the NY Times has also put a seal of approval on nerd chic an article on Boing Boing, in the business section. Which I guess is fair. Does the concept apply in librarianship, I wonder (this is a library blog)? Or is that really in the oxymoronic realm?

Creative Commons Takes Off?

Creative Commons: Through the Looking Glass is a blog run by Elliott Bledsoe, who works for Creative Commons Australia. CCA has had a new lease of life (new as far as leases of life go in the copyright sphere, anyway) since Elliott moved in, and there have been a few postings to the dormant Australian Creative Commons list, too.

There is also a CCA Facebook group, and you can join the mailing list for Creative Commons Australia by going to their website. Not to mention an events calendar and a Flickr photo pool.

Creative Commons in Australia is part of the funded research under the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi). It is hosted by Queensland University of Technology at the QUT Faculty of Law.

My problem with CCA is that I want some practical advice on how to implement Creative Commons at my institution, and no-one seems to tell me what to do. Not that I would necessarily do it, I just want some ideas for action.

Word of the day

Today's word is w00t. Many thanks to Tom, who has pointed out the Merriam-Webster word of the year list, from which I have taken this one, the word of the year. According to Merriam-Webster (and they are a dictionary, so they should know, but you be the judge of that) is means:

expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay"

w00t! I won the contest!

Submitted by: Kat from Massachusetts on Nov. 30, 2005 23:18

Sharp-eyed readers (that is, all readers of this blog) will have noticed that two of the letters are in fact numbers. The obviousness of this depends on what font is being used, and the pronunciation of nought, Oh or zero (whatever you call that number) is as if it was the letter O.

Merriam-Webster explains this by referring to the origins of the word in online gaming forums "as part of what is known as l33t ("leet," or "elite") speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. Although the double "o" in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for "we owned the other team"—again stemming from the gaming community."

The Wikipedia has an entry on it, and Google turns up 12 million search results, so I guess W00t really is a word.

Word of the day

The word of the day is ute, taken from the Oxford Australia Word of the Month for December, which is ute muster. This service provides Australian neologisms as an RSS feed, I imagine as a means of promoting the Oxford Australian Dictionary - the fact that its author is the marketing and product coordinator indicates this. The term is defined as "a gathering of utility trucks for display and competition."

Ute is one of my favourite words because it is a term we do not share with the US, and I can use it to indicate my nationality. This also applies to dog in a ute days, like the famous event in Corrigin in 2002 which broke the world dog in a ute record, and the uniquely Australian ute dog tie (just browse the site), and other ute lore.