Category: Words I’ve Made Up

Mech-turking

Verb. To do a manually do a process that either is or should be automated.

Usage:

“I haven’t had time to launch the new version, so we’re mech-turking the database until tomorrow.”

Origin: a verbing of Mechanical Turk

Credit for this word goes to: Peter Fleck

Another successful contribution to the pseudo-dictionary.

Opportunitize, Not Monetize

30,000 feet up, on my way to a 3-day client meeting I took a tip from Doc Searls and stared at the landscape.

That altitude provides a pretty good view of the roadway branding our country like a waffle iron. While I speculate most of these stretches of pavement are unused most of the time, without them, our economy would evaporate.

From regular Joes carpooling to the office, armies of FedEx and UPS trucks making their rounds, high school kids driving to their first job interview, garage bands loading up their gear for a show. My car? It’s sitting in a parking spot awaiting my return.

All while Eric Rice‘s Future of Podcasting plays in my headphones. He snarks, “People always ask ‘How do you make money at [podcasting/second life/etc]?'”

Opportunity.

Without a car, there are simply fewer opportunities. Opportunities to connect with other people. Opportunities to make money. While I don’t put direct pressure on my car to pay for itself, the inverse is true. Replace ‘car’ with ‘podcast’, ‘blog’, ‘laptop’, ‘telephone’, or ‘mouth’. The statement is still true.

Remember the bit from Dave Slusher’s Amateur Means You Do It For Love talk about how podcasting makes conversations and other opportunities happen? Opportunities that wouldn’t happen otherwise?

And remember when Doc rhetorically asked, “What’s the business model of my telephone?”

Yeah. Me too.

Opportunitize: to turn anything into an opportunity.
“No, my car doesn’t make any money, but I’ve opportunitized it to get a job.”

What an awful, corpspeak word, I just submitted to the pseudodictionary.

Startbucks

Based on Greg Olsen’s Going Bedouin article, “Startbucks” defines a small team of entrepreneurs, 3-5 people, working on the next great business from geographically disparate coffee houses, collaborating via internet access.

In the Experience Economy, this is free office space for the price of coffee (in contrast to free coffee for the price of office space).

Based on this history of this blog, I get one made-up-word a year. That’s cool. Like the others, I submitted this one to pseudodictionary.com. I’ll update this post if/when it’s accepted.

Update 1 Apr 2006: Startbucks is now in the pseudodictionary

FeedJ – Is “Feed Jockey” Dorkier than “Blogger”?

If disc jockeys combine pre-record music into a playlist to improve the mood of their audience, can the same be true for weblogs and RSS feeds?

The right aggregation of websites into a single feed, with everything you want and nothing you don’t, seems akin to the work of a good DJ.

A good weblog is a nice mix of pre-recorded and impromptu thoughts. Suppose it’s just a matter of deciding which is a dorkier term and sticking with it.