Ye olde jargon
Randall Munroe, in his XKCD comic, nicely sums up both why you should avoid jargon and why you shouldn’t worry about it.
Yahoo releases a “style guide for the web”
I love style guides almost as much as I love disagreeing with them. That’s why I’m excited to get my hands on Yahoo’s new house style book, The Yahoo! Style Guide. The style guide is available in hard copy (starting July 6) but much of the content is available on Yahoo’s style site at styleguide.yahoo.com.
I’m glad to see Yahoo has axed a lot of hyphens: 3D, not 3-D; email, not e-mail; and website, not web-site (in which they agree with AP).
Oddly, Yahoo offers Ni-MH for nickel-metal hydride (as in the batteries). Typically chemical compounds are not expressed using hyphens (NiCad anybody?).
Lifehacker puts it nicely:
As with any style guide, nothing’s written in stone—just because Yahoo or AP declares a style doesn’t mean it’s the only correct way (sorry Yahoo, but we’re sticking with “internet” rather than “Internet“)….
Based on my brief time there, the yahoo style site looks like a good resource. I’m looking forward to getting the book as well.
AP accepts “website” as one word
This is old news (in more ways than one), but the AP Stylebook now officially endorses “website” as the one-word term for, you know, websites. The Wired Epicenter blog has a nice write-up:
Of course, the cool kids have been tossing around “website” for at least a decade. But that’s the way it is with usage: Even when it does happen, it takes a while for language disruption to become a middle class value.
The added emphasis is mine.
1001 content strategy links
Via content strat doyenne Kristina Halvorson — check out Firehead’s page with “1001″ content strategy links. I just fell ‘way behind in my reading!
Facebook vs Twitter
When Twitter adds a feature they say, “Now you can…”. When Facebook adds a feature they say, “Now you do…”.