Loose the Jargon
Jargon is something that Information Professionals seem to be adept at creating. How many OPACs [oh look, there's one], databases, projects, organisations, and portals are there with goofy names? PADS, JISC, TASI, HUMBOL, RDN, EEVL, HUMBUL, SOSIG, [ add acronym/name here] . .
How many of them do our users know about? Probably not many.
How many do our users use on a regular basis? Probably only their favourite one.
TangognaT has pointed up something we should all be wary of. Confusing the user. But that is exactly what we should be doing.
No wait, got that the wrong we round… 
Dare I say it, Library 2.0 (which is a name we can use amongst ourselves but don’t tell anyone else) could be the way to bring all those disparate services together. As techies, we need to be hasseling our providers to provide those APIs, XML-RPC, SOAP, WSDL, REST.. [oh look, geeks have acronyms too!]
December 1st, 2005 at 13:44
A Different Day
In the normal mix of ’stuff’ in Talis Research, which currently for me is around Library 2.0 and the Talis Whisper demonstrator, it is nice occasionally to have a different day. Yesterday was one of those different days. It opened…
December 1st, 2005 at 21:51
‘Jargon’ really refers to the specialised, technical language of a trade, so that term could apply to OPAC, or the terms portal or gateway or RSS or feed, etc and such like, but not so much to the names of organisations or services.
What I think you are meaning is that there are too many brand names, which may be true, but then everything has to be called something.
There are, IMHO, far too many sites on the web doing very similar things, and each has its own name. No wonder people get confused.
Some brand names can be successful – new examples are e.g. flickr or del.icio.us or Bloglines.
Some brand names are pretty descriptive – e.g. the Internet Resources Newsletter http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/irn/irn.html but in many cases, its difficult to come up with an appropriate descriptive name.
The real secret is to have a good name and a good service. Not that many actually succeed in that department!
December 2nd, 2005 at 09:28
I take your point. I was using Jargon in its sense as nonsensical, incoherent, or meaningless talk. To the user (and indeed sometimes to me) that’s what it appears to be.