Drama 2.0’s Dictionary of Web 2.0 Doublespeak
I’ve always been amused, and at the same time disturbed, by the way the Web 2.0 “community” degrades language. In my opinion, some of the words and phrases it often uses have been degraded to the point where they are essentially meaningless.
I finally decided to jot down a quick list of some of the words and phrases that have become little more than doublespeak in the world of Web 2.0.
In the list below, you will find English words or phrases and what they mean/become in the Web 2.0 community.
This is by no means a comprehensive list so if you have additions, post them in the comments and I’ll add them where appropriate.
| English Word/Phrase | Web 2.0 Translation |
| Advertising | Conversation |
| Alpha | Beta |
| Anarchistic | Open |
| Acquaintance | Friend |
| Assumption | Fact |
| Average Person | Late Adopter |
| Babble | Conversation |
| Blog Network | Media Empire |
| Blogger | Journalist |
| Bootstrapped | Angel-Funded |
| Bubble | Boom, Uptrend |
| Business Model | No Translation |
| Circle Jerk | Blogosphere |
| Clusterfucked | Crowdsourced |
| Control | Privacy |
| Copied | New |
| Copyright | Injustice |
| Corporation | Evil |
| Crap | User-Generated |
| Distribution | Sharing |
| Egomaniac | A-List Blogger |
| Evolutionary | Revolutionary |
| Expert | Fool |
| Filtering | Discovery |
| Free Labor | Crowdsourcing |
| Freedom | Data Portability |
| Friend | Connection, Node |
| Friends | Social Graph |
| Geek | Early Adopter |
| Guesstimate | Measurement |
| Informed | Elitist |
| Intellectual Property | Public Property |
| Isolated | Social |
| Mob | Community |
| Narcissism | Self-Expression |
| Niche | Mainstream |
| Noise | Data, Information |
| Openly Biased | Transparent |
| Opinion | Analysis, Insight |
| Paid | Expensive, Overpriced |
| Personal Publishing | Voyeurism |
| Persuasive | Authentic |
| Power User | Consultant, Expert |
| Profitable | Antiquated |
| Projection | Certainty |
| Proprietary | Closed |
| Publicity | TechCrunch |
| Purchase | Recommendation |
| Realistic | Cynical, Skeptical |
| Revenues | Pageviews |
| Riot | Keynote Interview |
| Rumor | News |
| Sausage Fest | Party |
| Scarcity | Abundance |
| Slightly Different | Original |
| Social Network | Operating System, Platform |
| Socialism | Democracy |
| Spammy | Viral |
| Stalker | Follower |
| Stolen | Free |
| Subjective | Objective |
| Theft | Disintermediation |
| Trite | Innovative |
| Underemployed, Unemployed | Entrepreneur, Founder |
| Unprofitable | Valuable |
| Useless | Cool |
| User | Influencer |
| I | We |
















Very funny.
lol too funny!!!!! Everyone is an entrepreneur who is underemployed
Dude, this is brilliant.
Can’t… breathe… OMG. I think I broke something on this one.
*laughing*
first time it builds = alpha
alpha = beta
beta = 2.0
QA = no translation
Staging environment = no translation
Scalabilty = no translation
Careless/Fearless
Crap/User Generated
This is pretty interesting!!
more than that ery true!!
loved specially
Crap – User Generated
I’m surprised at how close to reality this is.