I have noticed recently the amount of acronyms used in the digital space increasing at a phenomenal rate. I used to keep up with all the latest abbreviations and phrases but find myself lost a lot of the time now. I think this is because people are obsessed with creating a term for something that doesn't need one.
I was reading a tender the other day and it asked for experience in the following: SOAP, REST, SR/W, atom syndication, semantic Web, RDF, data aggregation, AJAX, federated identity management (Shibboleth, OpenID), user centred design, metadata taxonomies and folksonomies, service orientated architecture… and the list went on. I was immediately put off attempting to write a response to this. The fact is I have experience in all these areas but would never categorise these skills into such ridiculous tags. Can there be anymore meaningless terms than “user centred design” and “service orientated architecture”? Maybe they were worried we would design the solution for a cyborg in mind with code optimised for an Atari 2600.
Let's take “metadata taxonomies and folksonomies”. In essence what this actually is, is a website owner creating categories for you and you assigning one to any content you upload vs. you tagging your content yourself using whatever words you see fit, i.e. blog tagging. So to clarify: the Playgroup site has a metadata folksonomy. Absolute nonsense - when people start using these phrases it's difficult to take them seriously.
On Wednesday I decided to look into improving our office Internet connection; at the moment we have a 2Mb line for 50+ people and it's painful. easynet sent me some information on “SureStream” - their next big thing. On the first page the following acronyms/phrases where found: HDSL multiplexing, SDH, NOC and SNMP (there were others as well but I was familiar with those). I'm not a network administrator and all this was nonsensical to me. I gave up half way through.
Finally this week I found myself writing a user manual for a piece of software we have just finished developing. It is called SICAMS (my predecessor named it); no one in the agency knew what it stood for. This is being rolled out to 200 car dealerships next Monday and we are sitting down trying to work out what the “I” stands for. Abbreviations can lead to mass confusion: another product, EDMAPI (again I didn't name it), stands for Electronic Direct Marketing API (Application Programming Interface) and is pronounced E-D-M-A-P-I. The account handlers like to call it E-D-MAPPY, despite my constant corrections they can't get their heads around it. Maybe it sounds friendlier but when the client starts saying it as well you just have to cringe.
