All frequent internet conversationalists should be familiar with the concept of initialism, whereby “If I recall correctly,” is shorted to “IIRC,” and pronounced I-I-R-C. The most commonly used initialisms occasionally make the shift to acronyms to be pronounced phonetically, which then gives rise to amusing phonetic perversions; i.e. “Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off!” becomes ROFLMAO which is imported to spoken English, and eventually back into text, as “waffle-mayo.” As a result of this phonetic borrowing I, and perhaps others as well, now sound the ‘word’ out in my head.
Chloey used an interesting, and in my experience unique, initialism construction in gTalk the other day.
… because im(elitist)o that’s the only way to use said adjective.
Now, I’m curious how natural that construction was for readers. IMHO is an often used and widely accepted initialism that has now become part of the standard Internet abbreviation lexicon and has never made the jump to an acronym. Therefore, I still process IMHO as ‘I-M-H-O,’ which might have made it more natural for me parse the unknown syntax. I didn’t chunk the whole word-phrase. ROF(laughing)MAO doesn’t quite seem as natural.
Of course then this could be just pure happenstance. I wonder if this injection is more common than I know or if this is just a one-time thing that won’t catch on. I like it.
Published on
July 7, 2008 in
rand().
I can’t post this directly to twitter because it would completed ruin the surprise and wonderful simplicity of the, um, tweet. But it’s so great! Twhirl, via is.gd, gave me http://is.gd/NNy for Numa Numa. /NNy maps to Numa Numa-yay! God doesn’t exist. Q.E.D.
People pour more multimedia into the cloud every day. But if you want anyone to find it and make use of it, it needs metadata. Tags, folders, classifications, descriptions, and titles. In a word, words. Search engines algorithms are classically s(text)→text. Several image search offerings perform very well at s(text)→images, but they rely on the words around the pictures.
TinEye is different. It hosts a true s(image)→images algorithm for web image search; to my knowledge it’s the first of its kind (publicly available). Right now, the engine itself is more useful for those searching for copyright violations. TinEye searches for pictures that look more or less exactly like the input so searching with a picture from a personal album will most likely produce nothing. But that won’t be true forever.
It won’t be long before the search space becomes s(image)→text. Want to know what kind of architecture some pillars exemplify? Or who painted that picture hanging on the wall? Take a picture of a church in Chile, a tomb in Argentina, or some random structure on a wharf, upload it with your phone and wham: instant tour-guide.
The information is in the cloud; we just need to get smarter about locating it.