Week 9 – fun with language

Netspeak: chat and text messaging has caused a sub-genre of language to emerge and this week we’ll take a look at some of the commonly used abbreviations and acronyms that we might come across as we’re working in an online environment. Of course, some of what we’ll find will also be a bit amusing, I hope.

As with most specialized languages, netspeak is created to show an insider status, but also to allow communications to occur in shorthand, and to save time. On the Internet, and particularly within chat, these kinds of terms allow for a simpler and faster level of communication [as long as you can make sense of what the term means]. Text messaging took this a few steps further, because texts are limited to a specific number of characters.

Netspeak
The most common one, which we probably all know, is LOL – though it would almost always be more accurate to type LIH. Don’t know LIH*? JGI*!

Text shorthand
tst msgs Rnt alw ez 2 figa ot, bt f u try, n f uv sum lvl of imagntn, ur ahed of d gme.

or:
Test messages are not always easy to figure out, but if you try, and if you have some level of imagination, you are ahead of the game.

For this week, let’s do a little research, and see how things go. Try to find between 5 and 10 examples of netspeak that amuse you, and a couple example of text message language, if possible.

Post the examples you find without translation, as a comment on this post – blog comments are something new, too, but easy to do – and include at least your name, so we know who has posted what we’re looking at! After a few days, we can start giving the translations to the harder ones. Have fun with this one!

[n.b. some of the more common ones can be relatively crude – so make your own decision about those!]
jjs

next week: Bookmarks!

*
[LIH - Laughing In Head]
[JGI - Just Google It]

Week 8, Part 2 – Gtalk

GTalk is one of my favorite internet tools, and I hope that you’ll also find it useful. There are a number of different ways to access GTalk, and part of the decision depends on what you’re going to use it for. For our work-based purposes, we’re going to want to download and install the GTalk desktop application, which you can get from: http://www.google.com/talk/
Either follow the download GTalk instructions on that page, or let me know, and I’ll come and help out. You can use your existing Gmail or Blogger userid and password to access GTalk. GTalk can also be run in a browser window [for when you can’t or don’t want to install the application]. This option can also be started from the http://www.google.com/talk/ page by choosing Launch Google Talk Gadget [help is also available from here]. This pops up a window that looks quite like the application and has most of the benefits of it. You can also run the Talk application from within Gmail [too many options?] it starts automatically when you log into your gmail account, and is on the left hand side of the page.


Here is what I’d like to do, to get everyone up and running with this, and to gain some experience with the program. The best solution is to download the application itself, since it’s the easiest one to use, and offers the most flexibility. Once you’ve done that, log in and look at the program itself. If you’ve used an Instant Messaging application already, it’ll look pretty familiar to you.


What I’d like to do is to have each of us log into GTalk for at least the rest of November, and let’s find reasons to use the program, to get comfortable with it. To make that happen, I’ll shortly send a piece of email with my Gtalk userid in it to everyone. Once you’re up and running, add yours to the list, and we’ll all add them. Once that’s done, as long as you’re logged in, we’ll all ‘see you’ and be able to chat.

There are a lot of interesting options that we can talk about once we’re all going, so if you’re a GTalk user, or explore and find interesting things, post them here are comments!


It’s easy, quiet simple and can be fun – so let’s see how it works for us.


One of the most important things to try and get accustomed to is to mark yourself as ‘away’ when you leave your desk – this takes a bit of practice. There is a little down arrow next to the default ‘available’ icon, just click on that, and you’ll see the options.


So, let’s try this out, and see how it works for us! If you're having trouble, let me know!


jjs