What are the buzzwords that drive YOU up the wall?

Let me state right now that most buzzwords are already old once they've achieved buzzword status. Any word that is a buzzword is tired, used and probably irking someone in the room, on the conference call or within the email. My biggest one these days that my clients use when they want to sound profound is "Customer Centric".

OK, to me, if you are not CC then you are pretty much as lively as a carboard box sitting in a warehouse, waiting for a mouse to nibble your feeble, broken little flaps.

I am irked at the words that have come to mean "PR/Public Relations" because a lot of my clients (I'm much, much smaller than Hawthorne Direct of course) seem to use the word to mean anything from media purchases to marketing plans. They don't get that PR is PR. So, it irks me.

Other than that - I'm more bothered by meeting talk; "ducks in a row" "putting out fires" "playing phone tag" and all of those other totally creative-less phrases that sound robotic and contrived.

An oldie but goodie that I understand has meaning but still bothers me from the first time I heard it until now ..."thinking outside of the box". OK, well, this goes back to the cardboard and dust ridden box image. So, first, creative people are outside of the box of the mass anyway. We are the witty, fun folks who entertain others. The phrase means nada though as no one ever says, "OK, let us stop and think in the box for a moment" What the heck IS the box? Oh wait, that is a nice way to say "moot thoughts". Nice.

Well, I'd love to "push the envelope" if I had a "ballpark figure" but right now I am "cautiously optimistic" whilst I spend "quality time" on my "user friendly" Mac, while I think about a "Vision Statement" for my client who is "breathing down my neck" while I get my "ducks in a row" as "I put out fires" on my "blogosphere" while I "LOL" on an "international website" (as opposed to the web sites that are only allowed in rural cornfields).

A buzzword that I will never get tired of though....."Paid!"

Michele M. Paiva
http://web.mac.com/mmpaiva

Web 2.0 bothers me because it is nebulous and ambiguous. It makes it sound like a particular technology where there is a clear line between 1.0 and 2.0 and there will be a clear line when 3.0 is released. Some people mean Ajax, some interactive web sites, some community web sites, some the current web investment bubble, some all of this lumped together. I've posted an interview I did a several months back with more thoughts about Web 2.0.

Net Neutrality is another one that bothers me. To me it is a rallying cry for a lobbyists afraid of large companies having too much control over the Internet. However, it has also been given a false technical connotation or association that the original Internet design treated all traffic the same. This is just plain false and there are many features where the Internet discriminates between different types of traffic for good reasons. Building cost-effective, scalable networks to support large quantities of high-quality video will require using these methods of traffic discrimination to work. To me it makes the net neutrality lobbyists look naïve, uninformed, and shows they are NOT the people to trust for ensuring the Internet progresses and works for widespread video.

For what I think is a balanced view, check out the Net Neutrality Primer at howstuffworks.com. Also look at handsoff.org which makes a good case that net neutrality proposals would actually retard the growth of the Internet.

Note, my views are net neutrality are very far from the hawthorne party line so don't get in me trouble!