I’ve been reading
Theodore Rex — the biography of President Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund
Morris — and came to a fascinating part where Roosevelt got behind a
"simplified spelling" campaign to drop superfluous letters in words. Looking at
the spellings, I realized that Teddy Roosevelt would have loved the Web 2.0 era.
It’s a long standing joke how Web 2.0 names drop letters in words.
Flickr, Zooomr,
Moviemappr that I talked about on
yesterday’s Daily
SearchCast podcast are some examples. Compare them to some of the simplified
spellings Roosevelt was pushing for:
- clipt rather than clipped
- dasht rather than dashed
- dript rather than dripped
- fixt rather than fixed
- lapt rather than lapped
- ript rather than ripped
- winkt rather than winked
You’ll find some background on Roosevelt’s campaign
here, along with his list
here. Scanning through it, I
can’t see that there were actually any words where an e was dropped before an
ending r. So maybe he wasn’t so Web 2.0 after all.
Then again, looking through resource like Ludwig Gatzke’s
collage of Web 2.0 logos, there actually don’t seem to be that many
companies with missing letters after all. Still, perhaps some of Roosevelt’s
proposed spellings might inspire new companies while the venture capital well is
still spewing out Web 2.0 money.
By the way,
Four Concentric Circles of a Web 2.0 Name is a nice rundown on Web 2.0 names
classified into different groups.
Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character? is a new classic quiz that you must take.
And Web 2.0 and The
Letter “e”: The Interview is a must read interview that will make you
chuckle. From the opening:
The darling of the dot-com bubble — the letter “e” — is conspicuously
missing and has decided to take a wait and see attitude this time around.In an exclusive e-mail exchange with our editors, the reclusive vowel talks
about what he’s been doing since the year 2000, his investment strategy, and
his thoughts on whether we’ve entered a new technology bubble.
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