Omar L. Gallaga writes about technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman. He's worked for more than nine years at the Austin American-Statesman and edited Technopolis, the newspaper's personal tech section, and ¡ahora sí!, Austin's Spanish-language newspaper. He's been a writer and performer with Austin's award-winning Latino Comedy Project and is a contributing writer for Television Without Pity, MSNBC.com's books section and The Almost Late Show with Bobby Bones. He writes a comic strip, "Space Monkeys!" with his brother, Pablo, and lives in New Braunfels with his wife and three technologically savvy cats.
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The entry titled "Yawn-worthy tech words."
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2005 > November > 17 > Entry
By Omar Gallaga
| Thursday, November 17, 2005, 01:51 PM
When I see a press releases or news items in my inbox that contains the following techno-buzzwords, my mouse finger immediately moves toward the “DELETE” key (note — these words can be combined to make even more boring phrases):
MMORPG
Tech-savvy
Proprietary
Security-enhanced
Solution
Wireless
Hotspot
Must-have technology
Functionality
iPod-compatible
Anything to do with awards for blogging
Mobile
Storage
Microsoft
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By Omar G.
November 18, 2005 11:41 AM | Link to this
They keep forgetting to add the "(Idiot)" to my "Digital Savant" title.
There really is a problem of volume, though. If you saw all the press releases that I see in a day (not including the ones directly related to my main job at ¡ahora sí!), you'd see that some sort of filtering has to take place or I'd spend 80 percent of time wading through e-mails that have little to no use to anything we'd likely cover.
My point in the post wasn't that deleting e-mails is better than reading them -- it was that subject lines tend to blur together and there are some words that pop up again and again, even when they have little relevance to what's actually in the press release. You don't know how many times I've received an e-mail with a subject line that says "Must-have technology!" only to open the message and see that it's for a Budweiser koozie or a subscription-based service for Internet porn.
Truly, we live in amazing times.
By Ron Seybold
November 18, 2005 8:17 AM | Link to this
Wow. Unless this is an attempt at comedy, some of those words are actually important — if you want to know something about a tech product's capabilities. As someone who says he's an iPod user, how do you decide if a new accessory is something that works with your that device that's surgically attached to your hand? If you're looking for a new laptop, how do you determine what you might buy if you're immediately deleting everything with "wireless" in it?
My Mac's dictionary widget reports that the antonym of savant is 'ignoramus.' The approach of deleting as editing makes me wonder how an editor gets to savant status. The word savant, from the French, means literally ‘knowing (person).'
I sat across from an IDG tech editor at a media dinner last month who admitted he had his knowing radar turned way down. "Face it," he said. "If I have a chance to cover this release from IBM, and one from this tiny little company, which is going to be more important?" A quest for knowing is why we're reading blogs. I think it means the editors are supposed to be reading for us — at least before they're so quick to delete.