The Lexicographer's Rules

Feedster launched a brand-new look and search engine today. Much improved! Although I must admit that when they let me have a sneak peek at it yesterday, I sent a list of pie-in-the-blue-sky ideas and wistful demands for a pony.

I’m not claiming prophet status or anything (I think the rule for that is life plus 70 years. Or is it ten years dead? I dunno.), but it’s so nice to see someone else independently arrive at an idea and make it real. The Battery Maritime Building is one-of-a-kind. It’s old New York. When you walk through lower Manhattan, judging the buildings with a critical eye—sierras and forests composed of nothing but glass, granite, and concrete—and then see the Battery Maritime Building, you get a little charge in your spine. Or at least I do. It looks even better contrast with the barf-inducing Staten Island Ferry terminal (officially the “Whitehall Ferry Terminal,“ I believe) nearby, at least before the terminal’s renovation. So I’ve always thought that the Battery Maritime Building needed to be renovated, turned into a gallery of non-chain food joints, art shops, coffee lounges, and the like. And, voilà, my wish is granted.

I swear, if I had had a billion dollars in 1993-94, the housing boom and the renovation of New York City would have happened 10 years earlier.

I finally received the iPod Nano given as a gift by Feedster! At the end of last year, they named Double-Tongued Word Wrester as having the third best feed of the year for 2005. The Nano is the prize for that. They even engraved it. Yay!

Now, I don’t want to seem churlish and ungrateful, but I hope they also soon fix their search engine so that if you click on the link for the last page in a list of results the database doesn’t always time out with “NULL Database link” or “We’re sorry but Feedster is temporarily down for maintenance. We’ll be back soon.“ It’s almost impossible to see the oldest results turned up by a search for a term with more than a few months of history.

Incidentally, IceRocket has a similar problem. If a search turns up more than 50 pages of results sorted by date, it’s impossible to see pages 51 or higher. You have to do a custom date search instead to exclude recent results. IceRocket also does not always correctly display phrase search results: if you search for “real life,“ for example, more than a few of the result summaries do not show the phrase, but instead contain the separate words “real” and “life”—although the phrase is indeed inside the post if you click through to the result. But having to click through takes too much time—accurate summaries are really very useful for judging search results before clicking through to one.

I use both search engines, by the way, when trying to find earliest uses of slang words, especially those that seem to have arisen in the online world or contemporaneously with it.

I have just finished going through a copy editor’s queries on the manuscript of my upcoming book, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. I am late in returning the MS pages, but that’s because someone brilliantly decided to deliver them immediately before the holidays, when I was headed to Missouri for nine days and when, upon my return to New York City, I was off to Albuquerque for five more.

That’s not the sole reason the pages are late. Part of it is that it pains me to go through these queries because too many are, by and large, ridiculous. Some real errors have been caught and I am glad of that, and I appreciate the “better safe than sorry” ethos, but really.

Across the whole publication, because the copy editor failed to read the front matter—all dictionary editors know that nobody reads the front matter, which is why they can get away with recycling the same few articles in every edition, but you’d expect your copy editor to read it, particularly since it was part of the author’s instructions—there’s a proofing mark on asterisks in front of dozens of dates, as if they are wrong, when, in fact, as the front matter explains, the asterisks indicate that the date is uncertain.

Many of the queries have double question marks after them. Despite common practice, I don’t believe there’s a magnifying or doubling effect in using multiples of punctuation at the end of a sentence. It doesn’t make it seem like more of a question: not a better question nor a more revealing question nor a more serious question nor a more dramatic question. It just comes off like the inarticulate “WTF?!!!?“ outrage of a 14-year-old.

On the entry for Trashcanistan the query says “This last example refers to Soviet Union/Europe, yet definition says Middle East countries only. OK?“ Not OK. In fact, the definition says, “Afghanistan; any poor Middle Eastern country or central Asian republic.“ Who said the former Soviet Union was exclusively in Europe? And why didn’t the copy editor see that part about central Asian republics?

At the entry for merk, there’s a direct quote from lyrics by Nas, “His moms had a stare I wouldn’t dare second look when I merk.“ The copy editor wrote next to it, “Should ‘moms’ here be singular?“ What kind of lily-white hole do you have to have been living in to not recognize that particular element of Black English?

At metric buttload, there’s a citation that reads, in part, “The Spanish have a ton of street cred.“ The copy editor marked, “Is cred here OK?“ It’s another one of those things I guess you wouldn’t ever learn until you reached your majority and your dad finally unsealed the fallout shelter so you could see what had become of the world.

There are more but the point has been made.

I hate to sound like numeeja tard Kyle Shannon in 1995, but old media just don’t get it. They want news aggregators to pay for using their headlines—never mind that most of these newspapers would suffer ginormous drops in online readership if it weren’t for sites like Google News directing traffic their way. The search engines are doing what the old media are too stupid to do for themselves: make their content easily searchable as a body. They greedily assume they can maintain the same level of readership and web traffic without the news aggregators.

There are better ideas for improving your online profits, newsdorks.

Stop thinking you’re a one-stop news source. You’re not. Most of your visitors are not the same day after day. You aren’t the only place they go. Your readers are now used to first choosing from a palette of possible topics, and then determining which sources to read. They’re nowhere near as likely (except for notable exceptions such as the really, really big media outlets, such as the New York Times) to first visit your site and then decide what to read. Instead, like any daily site, be it blog, blute, or Dagbladet, you get bursts of traffic because of significant news coverage. This means you need outside sources pointing to your content, which means you need to start collaborating with online media, bloggers, and others who can interweave your existing presence with the Internet instead of trying to make it a stand-alone does-all site. (Don’t you wish you’d done this sort of thing for your classifieds before Craigslist started eating your lunch?)

Open up your archives. They should be free. Never expire old articles. Never remove articles from your web site. Decorate those archived articles with ads. Make each article have a unique permanent URL. Permit deep-linking. The more online content you have, the larger the web presence you will have, the more likely your site will be to turn up as the result of searches, the more people will see your ads, the more people will click on them. This will increase your mind share. This will enhance your status as an authoritative source. This will make you money.

Promote yourselves. Every day I have reason to visit the web sites of hundreds of newspapers, radio stations, and television stations around the world. Very, very few do any marketing of their web site outside of their own offline media outlet—newspapers promote their web sites on the printed page, radio stations promote their web sites on their frequency, television stations promote their web sites on their channel. It’s a closed loop. Many of those web sites are not listed in any of the web portals or search engine directories. A ridiculous number do not even tell you what city or state they operate in—it’s been all but impossible, in some cases, to discover this information without a “whois” search or visit their weather link, if they have one. They do this because they naively assume their audience is local. It isn’t. There are strangers who come and who buy things, strangers who might just be interested in what these media outlets have to offer. These are strangers who might be investing in your community, who might be moving a family there, who might be looking for a vacation spot, who might be wanting to retire to the town they grew up in—or who might just want to read what your colorful newspaper columnist has to say.

Use the Internet. Where’s your newspaper’s Flickr feed for your staff photographers? Where’s the blog run by your reporter? Where are your reporters commenting on other blogs about their area of expertise? (Messages to Romanesko do not count.) Where’s the deli.cio.us account of hot links your television staff likes? Where’s a list of your on-air personalities’ favorite YouTube videos? Where’s your Slashcode-based self-moderated blog for your readers to submit items of interest?

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My own newspaper experience was short and small-time, so I feel a bit like a bootblack making suggestions on building a bridge, but old media are, in fact, still missing the point. Get with it, stegosaurus, or die. The meteor is on its way.

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