In case you where wondering:

“A neologism is a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created (“coined”) —often to apply to new concepts, or to reshape older terms in newer language form.” [Wikipedia definition]

A few popular examples include: podcast, google, folksonomy, slashdot effect, blogosphere, email, spam, and let’s not forget internet (not sure how we ever got anything done without that word). Many other favorites fall entirely outside of the realm of technology. For instance, Made-up words in The Simpsons turns up as one of the most heavily bookmarked pages on del.icio.us for the term “neology“.

Some would say that an increase in neologisms indicates that we are living in a period of extreme innovation where new words are constantly required to keep up with all the unique products and services that are being developed. If so, I wonder whether an increase in the production of neologisms could be used as an indicator of economic growth in the larger sense?

Ingar Roggen identifies the importance of neologisms in his writings about innovation and Gestalt theory. For more on this, you can head over to his site and read his article entitled: Root Knowledge. The part that caught my attention was toward the beginning where he outlines the importance of neology with regards to technological change. He starts out by saying, “No new science is possible without neologisms”. He goes on to say some interesting stuff like, “To reject neologisms, often despicably, is to reject scientific development”, and “everybody wanting to contribute new knowledge must be [a neologist]“.

All this fits in nicely with an earlier post i wrote entitled: “folksonomy, and people’s classification management 101” which discusses the flexibility and power of tagging as an alternative to using traditional categories to organize information. The ever-increasing number of social networking services like del.icio.us and technorati are making heavy use of tagging as a way to get at information in interesting and creative ways. One of the coolest things about tagging is that all of the terms that are used are chosen by the people who use them. Anyone is free to come up with their own made up words to describe something new, provided no other word already exists to describe what it is they’re talking about. But new tags, like all neologisms, also require cultural acceptance to ensure their survival. So, as long as the idea behind the word makes some kind of impact on our culture, people will start to use it, and these new folksonomy based softwares will probably serve to facilitate their dissemination and eventual adoption.

Oddly enough, while there are lots of articles on the web dealing with the word “folksonomy”, there isn’t that much out there being written about neology. This is surprising to me, given the growing importance of choosing unique names for new Web 2.0 products and services, standing out as a start-up, building branding, not to mention ranking well on search engines. Currently, searches for the term “neology” on both tech.memorandum and digg.com turned up no results (although “neologism” turned up 1 result on digg: Made-up words in The Simpsons – mentioned above). The same search on del.icio.us only turned up a mere 73 results, and most of these were either definitions of the term or long lists of popular neologisms (the later of which only furthers my point). Compare that number to the 1255 results returned on del.icio.us for the term “folksonomy” and some interesting questions begin to form.

Why are so many people interested in writing about folksonomies? What does it mean if everyone has a relatively equal shot at creating language? How do societies cope with an exponential growth in language (always adding more and more new words, terms and phrases to our vocabularies every year)? And finally, why is there so little being written about the growing significance of neologisms? or am i the only one who finds it interesting that suddenly everybody and their mother is creatively coming up with awesome made up words for all kinds of things from technical jargon to corporate trademarks.

One thing that’s not cool is when companies like Linksys sell you wireless networking hardware that costs a lot of money with next to no documentation to support the product. The closest thing you get is a huge 6-foot poster thingy, with lots of beautiful photographs and absolutely no useful information. What do they think i’m gonna do with it, hang it on my wall? Then you go to the website and it’s impossible to navigate, and all you see are catchy slogans all over the place, talking about how easy it is to setup your wireless home network.

I know that Linksys uses Cisco parts so that’s good. I also found their wireless products to have really good range, as compared to similar products by Netgear, D-Link, MSI, GVC. I had put together a number of different wireless networks solutions for people using a Linksys WRT54G wireless router, PCMCIA and PCI cards, but many of them wanted to extend their networks either upstairs, downstairs, into the backyard, you name it.

So i did some research and came up with the Linksys WRE54G Wireless Range Extended. Also known as a “repeater”, the WRE54G has been around for a while and is supposed to let you increase the range of your network past the average 100FT max. Theoretically, you could double that distance but throughput (your bandwidth) is cut in half with every hop. So basically, with every range extender you add, speed (in this case) goes from 54 Mbps to 27 Mbps to 13.5, and so on. What’s great about it though, is that unlike a wireless bridge or access point, the range extender doesn’t actually plug into you LAN directly. That means no need to run ethernet cable from the router to the device, just plug it into the wall outlet for power and your good to go.

Anyway, i got the WRE54G because it was also a Linksys product, same manufacturer as the rest of the equipment, and hoped this would ensure compatibility, maximum performance and stability. Let me tell you – i was wrong. First of all, i haven’t seen much stability in the way of wireless networks in general. What i have seen is: 2 wireless “g” products from different manufacturers, that should work fine together, but don’t. So from now on, i try to go with all components from the same manufacturer. Second, i later found out that the WRE54G only works with 2 other Linksys products: the WRT54G and WRT54GS wireless routers (so much for maximum compatibility). Luckily, i had one of these – but come on, 2 other products..

The disk provided by Linksys takes you easily through the setup of the range extender. Ironically, this entire process is completely unnecessary as you can just plug in the WRE54G and connect to it directly without using the disk at all. In fact, you don’t even need to do anything at all; the default setup will normally do just fine until you get more comfortable with the whole thing. What they fail to tell you before you buy the WRE54G, is that it is completely useless and that it won’t work. Well, not right out of the box anyway, and not with the wireless router i had.

The main problem is (and this is a big one): that the range extender uses WDS (a bridging technology), and the wireless router doesn’t have this feature built in. very disturbing indeed. After hours of wondering why i could connect, but not get the internet – i decided it was time to hit the web a second time. i looked for troubleshooting and how-to pages and once again the Linksys site was no help. Frankly, at this point, i don’t know if i would believe them if they did offer some advice. i ended up on TomsNetworking.com, reading about how to manually setup the WRE54G with almost any other wireless router except the one i had. all you needed was a WDS capable device and as it turns out, the only way i was going to get my wireless Linksys router to play nice with his brother is by flashing the BIOS and installing firmware that has WDS functionality. i soon found out that Sveasoft Alchemy firmware is best for the job and thanks to phillippe [niquille.com], i was finally able to download it.

From that point on, everything else went pretty smoothly. i followed the relevant steps from the article on tomsnetworking.com and finally got the range extender to associate itself with the wireless router. Now i’ve got 2 big hotspots that i can connect to..

i’m exhausted just thinking about it.

Both FrSIRT and CNET are reporting a recently discovered security vulnerability affecting all versions of Firefox, including the recently released Firefox 1.5 Beta.

According to FrSIRT, “A vulnerability has been identified in Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Suite, which could be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands. This flaw is due to a buffer overflow error in the “NormalizeIDN” function when handling malformed URLs containing “0xAD” characters embedded in HTML tags (e.g. “A HREF”), which could be exploited by remote attackers to take complete control of an affected system via specially crafted Web pages”.

Apparently Netscape 8.0 is also affected by a similar issue.

CNET is claiming that security researcher Tom Ferris mentioned the problem to the Mozilla Foundation as early as Sunday, then decided to publicly disclose the flaw. Mozilla responded by stating that the bug is still under investigation and that “users are currently not at risk because there are no known attacks that take advantage of the flaw”.

The Solution / Temporary Fix: (according to FrSIRT)

Disable IDN support by entering “about:config” in the location bar, and then setting “network.enableIDN” to “false”.

Update: BetaNews is reporting [September 12, 2005, 12:09 PM] that: “Mozilla developers acted fast to patch a new security vulnerability in Firefox, which slipped its way into the first beta build of Firefox 1.5 and exists in earlier versions as well. However, the patch simply disables the buggy feature while a permenant fix is worked out”. Still useful for all those not comfortable with the fix provided above.

Update: Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 was released [September 21, 2005, 12:09 PM] which addresses several recent security issues, including the one described above. For more info you can visit Mozillazine.

This time, it’s not the musicians, or moviestars, but regular bloggers that are being hit.

Whether it is a totally copied web design, or just plain old fashioned content theft, the issue of plagiarism on the web keeps creeping up. Often, there is vey little you can do to prevent these occurances, and if it does happen to you, the infringement usually isn’t worth the cost of taking legal action. But what i find most interesting is that today, more and more website owners are standing up for themselves and fighting back.

As an alternative (or in addition) to dealing with costly copyright lawyers, web owners can empower themselves by being proactive. Through the use of clever keywords and the awesome power of search engines like google, it is possible to expose these culprits to the rest of the web community. A good example of this type of effort can be found at Smart IT Consulting. Here the author does a very thorough jobs of advertising all kinds of information about the accused. Included is a brief description of what happened, followed by a list of the thiefs’ email addresses, the original source material as well as a reprint of the stolen content, complete with screenshots and Whois Information for the offending domain.

Smart IT Consulting is also where i first learned about Copyscape. They offer a free service that will search the web (using google APIs) and tell you if any of your content is being reproduced. All you have to do is enter the URL of your page that you want to check, and Copyscape returns a list of possible matches. Results are organized in a simple and clean manner, with many extra features, like highlighting the copied portions of text, a copied word count, even links to the actual paragraph in question. Naturally, there is also a paid version of this service called Copysentry that will search your entire site for you on a regular basis, emailing you the results, so you don’t have to enter each page individually.

That being said, i can’t help but feel a little bad for all those unknowing highschool students who are going to copy eachother’s term papers, only to find that the teacher has caught them using Copyscape. Oh well, live and learn.

RSS Search Engine Marketing (RSSEM) is a term i keep reading about, and many sites are using rss technology to boost their site ranking. Listing rss feeds on these types of sites has the dual benefits of, additional visibility (on the rss directory), and increased inbound links (higher overall site ranking).

These are a collection of sites that are either directories themselves or provide useful links to site that will list your weblog or rss feeds. Note: most webmasters caution site owners no to submit to too many directories at once, and this may raise a red flag with major search engines like google, and result in some form of penalty which would utlimately affect your site’s ranking. The best advice seems to be to grow your links slowly, intelligently (because we are not robots), consistently, and over a significant amount of time.

Sites with links to directories:

• RSSTop55 – Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites is a great site, updated regularly.
• Fagan Finder – Blogs and RSS Search Engines has search engines, reference, tools, and more.

List of Directories:

• 2RSS.com – RSS feeds, RSS directory, RSS software, RSS scripts, RSS articles, RSS syndication, XML, RDF, news.
• Blogdex – is a research project of the MIT Media Laboratory tracking the diffusion of information through the weblog community.
• Feed Shark – Submit your RSS feed for free!
• Daypop – a current events/weblog/news search engine
• Syndic8 – is a directory of thousands of syndicated feeds from around the world.