[Image Credit: Despotes]

There are some wonderful “bizzwords” in the show, along with some historical perspective. As the show description notes:

Every walk of life has its lingo. Its buzzwords and catchphrases. American business has its own colorful menagerie of slang, and always has — from bulls and bears, to bootstraps, and 800-pound gorillas, and fish in a barrel.

But buzzwords and catchphrases change. They turn over and make way for newcomers.

And when they do, in American business, they may tell us something about where we and our economy are headed.

If you lived through the business world of the 80s, you no doubt encountered a consultant or executive who talked about “re-engineering business processes” or finding “synergies” between different products.

Cube farmers could be depended upon to be seen “prairie dogging” when something happened around the office. Networking at cocktail parties was hot.  Blamestormers might be Dilberted. Seagull managers might fly in to observe their microserfs, make a lot of noise, poop over everything and then leave.

If you worked in technology, you probably had a PC. As a hacker, you might have laughed about clueless users needed treeware. Everyone worried about career-limiting moves (CLMs) that might result from a bad click or command, propagating in an ohnosecond.

And of course, like, ya know, everything was, like, totally rad, dude.

In the 90s, couch potatoes turned to mouse potatoes as office workers all jumped on the Information Superhighway. Wired happily documented it all in its Jargon Watch column. By the end of the decade, i-everything and e-anything created one of the great tech bubbles.

Everyone wanted to go IPO. A few years later so one of the great crashes. Dotcommers became dotgoners and dotbombers. The 80/20 rule defined actionable moments after careful cost-benefit analyses. If something could be outsourced, it was. Viral marketing zipped off into email distribution lists, moving through word of mouse.

In the late ’00s (naughts), the Web 2.0 bubble has replaced the Internet bubble, as social networkers expand their social graphs, exposed to infotisements and advertorials as they blog, edit wikis and surf the blogosphere with RSS readers on iPhones. Online marketers are accountable for the ROI of every campaign. We’ve crowdsourced many actions and processes, whereever feasible, bending to the wisdom of the crowd and selling to the long tail.

Google is both a verb and a noun, along with nearly every conceivable form in between. Despite the company’s best efforts, google has even escaped proper noun status in many communities. The President calls it “the Google.”  The senior senator from Arizona talks about “a google.” The junior senator  from Illinois (and his search committee) Googled potential vice-presidential candidates. As billions of revenue from search adverstising each quarter streaming in to the Internet giant, it’s clear we’re a culture of Googlers googling each other, egosurfing away.

We’re also frazzing, dangerously close to overload by switching from email to cell phone to IM to text messages to meetings to Twitter and the Web.

Steeped in media from satellite and cable news networks, DVRs, DVD-players, on-demand programming and Web video, there’s even a danger of what sociologist Emile Durkheim might have identified as a kind of digital anomie, colorfully described as “Dorito Syndrome” — a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction and emptiness, regardless of consumption.

No matter how much screensucking you do, there’s always more. Lisa Belkin wrote about a number of these in the New York Times in 2006 in Overly Wired.

Widgets are everywhere now, of course, and may be anything from a small gadget to an embeddable module in an iGoogle page to a downloadable desktop application or even (gasp) an esoteric mechanical device. (Guinness drinkers have their own version, of course.)

The green computing wave spurred by skyrocketing energy costs from power-hungry data centers has spawned many biologically-themed terms.

Greenwashing, astroturfing and blacksurfing have all entered the lexicon. Every product seems to live in its own ecosystem.

Freemium business models now may promote coopetition between fierce competitors, perhaps using telepresence rooms that are far too expensive for standard percussive maintenance.

Under such conditions, “matadors” (people skilled at dodging assignments or responsibility) have little chance of scraping by, as the presence technologies, pervasive computing and “status message culture” adopted by the millenials puts “slacking” firmly into the lexicon of decades-past.

And, of course, we’re all increasingly computing in the cloud now.

As we near the end of this decade, the buzzwords of the ’10s have yet to be coined and collectively sampled, savored and entered into the lexicons maintained by Merriam-Webster, the Oxford Englsh Dictionary and, of course, the best online IT encyclopedia online. (Shameless plug).

Some will end up as sniglets, humorous oddities of cultures past. Other words will always remind the culture at large of a certain time and place.

Here’s hoping we can improve on vlog, blook and webinar.

If you have an idea of what lingo might define the next decade of business, let me know at ahoward@techtarget.com or leave a comment.

If scientists succeed in a new, boldly conceived project, such a dream might become reality. Meet the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). [Press release]

A steering committee of senior officers from Harvard University, Smithsonian Institution, Field Museum, Marine Biological Laboratory, Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, Missouri Botanical Garden, and the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations has proposed that “an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as all those later discovered and described. Encyclopedia of Life will be used as both a teaching and a learning tool, helping scientists, educators, students, and the community at large gain a better understanding of this planet and all who inhabit it.”

The EOL project has its roots in the writing of biologists Dan Jenzen and E.O. Wilson. Wilson’s 2003 essay on the topic and then a speech 2007 speech (read his wish on TED.com) at the influential TED Conference have brought the concept to wider attention.

Essentially, the EOL hopes to combine collaborative editing using wikis and mashups of a number of other sources of scientific materials. Crucially, entries will edited and approved by scientists to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of the information.

Draft species pages that demonstrate some of the possibilities of a fully implemented system are already available at http://www.eol.org.

The project’s creators hope to have actual, authenticated species pages available by mid 2008. You can learn more by reading the EOL FAQ or watching this video on YouTube.

Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing has also posted about EOL , noting that while the project has received a $50 million dollar funding commitment led by the MacArthur Foundation, the EOL “reminds [him] a lot of Kevin Kelly’s All Species Foundation, which ran out of funding around 2003. It was a TED-borne idea.”

We’ve gone on to note the various distributions, including lightweight versions in the skinny Linux family like Feather Linux, Austrumi and even Puppy Linux. These operating systems are often run directly from live distros burned onto CDs or from hot-swappable flash memory-based jump drives.

We’ve also podcasted about portable applications, where we learned how open source applications like Mozilla‘s Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird email client, along with Audacity, OpenOffice and many other apps have been made mobile. Similarly, these applications are run directly from portable storage media or devices. And, like many others, we’re watching how the OLPC’s XO is received and works “in the wild” as it moves from prototype to worldwide distribution.

Now, we’re taking note of the next version of the “portable desktop,” at least as described by Wired’s Monkey Bites blog. Meet “Damn Small Linux,” a distribution of Linux that takes up a mere 50 megabytes of memory. That makes it small enough to fit on most flash drives. Aside from adding even more acronym confusion to the world of computing (given that Damn Small Linux is shortened to “DSL”), DSL is the latest example of how simple experiments using the open source model of development can become robust distributions. In this case, the original concept was to see how many (usable) desktop applications could fit inside of a 50 MB CD, including a functional operating system.

If you’re wondering how many that is, by the way, the current breakdown, according the DSL Web site, includes:

XMMS (MP3, CD Music, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo Web browser, Netrik Web browser, Firefox, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US English), a word processor (Ted), three editors (Beaver, Vim, and Nano [pico clone]), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and xzgv), Xpdf (PDF Viewer), emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, IRC), VNCviwer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), a Web server, calculator, generic and Ghostscript printer support, NFS, Fluxbox and JWM window managers, games, system monitoring apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, PCMCIA support, some wireless support.

Of course, that list could grow over time, but we’re still impressed by the power of community. In fact, it sounds like another example of crowdsourcing to our ears.

Jeff Howe, who we interviewed about crowdsourcing earlier this year, will be drawing from the project for his upcoming book on the subject. Make sure you check out our crowdsourcing podcast if you missed it the first time around.

The vision is quite straightforward: Everyone is an expert in something. Knowledge of that something can be visually explained in less than 5 minutes. Users can easily upload their shorts, using a visual storyboard to annotate videos and add outbound hyperlinks. While the Web site is still relatively new, there’s already some useful content in the tech section including Running ScanDisk in XP and How to do a Google Search.