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You Say Tomato, I Say Del.icio.us

This is a guest post by MikeonTV. The self proclaimed Social Media Jedi who is consistently burning up social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us & Stumbleupon. Feel free to follow him on Twitter, Pownce & FriendFeed.

Del.icio.us Digg is to Dugg as ____ is to Del.icio.us? Don’t worry. We aren’t about to make you take the SAT’s over again ) But remember the days (if you’re outside the USA, bear with us) when you took the SAT verbal and you had word association questions like this?

Do you Digg, Tweet or Stumble? If so, how exactly would you tell me that? Perhaps you’re busy submitting and commenting at Reddit and Newsvine. But there has to be a word you use to announce that. Are you Redditing or are you Redding? Did you Mixx it or was it simply Mixxed? These days there are many popular social media sites, each with their individual style or niche. But what really distinguishes a website is the name – with that, an action. Breaking it down let’s say you announce on Twitter (you would be Tweeting by the way) that your Digg submission was Dugg 1200 times. That’s a pretty simple example right? Now if that Photoshop tutorial you wrote hit the front page of Del.icio.us because 150 people saved it, was it Delicioused 150 times? Maybe Delished? Some people would say their submission was Ate and I’ve even used Licked a couple of times, myself.

At Now Sourcing, we went to the people of Twitter and asked: How do you put Social Media in the past tense? The results were interesting and amusing! On Digg If you thought that XKCD comic was creative you Dugg it. On Reddit you either Reddited or simply Upvoted that article on Ron Paul supporters voting against McCain. You Propelled or Propellered the one about the Muslim Gunman and you just Wonged the Powerful CSS Techniques submission over at Mister-Wong.

That fascinating website titled Photos Of Lost Cites was Stumbled, Liked, SU’ed and Tagged by your friends but you Thumbed it! Here is where you get to have some fun.

The king of organizing your bookmarks online is definitely Del.icio.us. The available tools, minimalism and ease of use make it very non-threatening to completely move the bookmarks native to your browser to an online service and begin tagging. When you’re saving art website My Schizophrenic Brain you would obviously think the act would be referred to as either Delicious’d, Tagged or B’marked, Right? Well they don’t stop there! That link could be considered Eaten, Ate, Dellied, Digested, Consumed, Licked, Ripened or just D’ed. Del.icio.us users have a nimiety of choices.

So now we ask what the readers of NowSourcing would classify the action of saving a link at Del.icio.us as. As always your input is graciously appreciated.

3 Comments

  1. david

    An interesting linguistic conundrum that needs no solution. After all, if there was actually a need for such a word—that is, if “saved it” was really unacceptable—it would or will develop organically.

    Forcing linguistics doesn’t work. Consider the failed pronoun “thon.” (I’d offer you a site that details that history, but I couldn’t find one.)

    david’s last blog post..Household Electricity Consumption

  2. Pierre Far

    Good question and very fun answers. On one internal project that talked to delicious extensively, I used the variable names “yummy”, “food”, and “cook” a lot. Something yummy was an item (a link) stored on delicious, and a collection of items returned by the delicious API was called food.

    The submission function was called Cook(), i.e., make something delicious.

    Hey, programmers have to entertain themselves somehow 🙂

    Pierre

    Pierre Far’s last blog post..MS Live Still Referral Spamming