Naming Rights

On my recent road trip I listened to a bunch of podcasts. One was TWIT (This Week in Tech) where a bunch of folks discuss the tech news of the week. This episode was recorded at VloggerCon. So, a big question was “what is vlogging.” The “panel” didn’t give much of a hoot, but offered up other terms: video blogging, Internet video, etc.

We are having our own little war of words in our corner: mashups? mix-ins? dashups? The former, they say, comes from music, where a DJ or musician mixes bits of different recordings together. That’s worked for me. Mix-ins, a term Microsoft uses, so far as I know, comes from ice cream enhancement. (I would offer it was invented here by Steve’s, the great ice cream place here in Boston when I was young.) SRC and Dean Stoecker are offering up demographic data to be added, hence creating dashups. (I listened to Dean introduce the idea on a special Very Spatial Podcast.)

On a related note, I’ve been working on my own vocabulary. In a few presentations I’ve done lately, I referred to “the traditional GIS players” and “the new players.” I’m ok with the former (and ESRI/MapInfo/Intergraph have not suggested another term) but not the latter. Recently Michael Jones of Google took journalists to task regarding our inability to understand what companies like his are doing. He patiently explained about “organizing the world’s information.” So, then, how do I refer to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft? “The companies organizing the world’s information?” Some writers use “GYM,” which I suspect has bad associations for readers of a certain age. Further, I want to be able to refer just to the “geo” part of these companies, though of course its a well intergrated bit, because frankly, I can’t keep tabs on the entire organization. (To be fair, I can’t do that for Intergraph or ESRI either!) Finally, I want to include MapQuest, Ask.com and others here, too.

What about Platial and ZIllow? How do we describe those companies? Commercial mashups/mixins/dashups? Neogeography?