TTOTD - The Blog

Fwd: "texting" - Word of the Day from the OED

2008-04-06T04:43:00.001-07:00

TTOTD was inspired, in part, by the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day. Yesterday, they returned the favor. Alas, that link will only work for the next few hours or if you have a subscription to OED. So OED, please consider this as an free advertising. Heres the relevant part of the entry:

OED Online Word of the Day

An unsurpassed guide to the meaning and history of millions of words, both present and past, the Oxford English Dictionary Online is the most powerful online lexical resource on the Internet! Subscribe today for only $29.95 a month, and you can have access to the "greatest work in dictionary making ever undertaken." – The New York Times

texting, n.

DRAFT ENTRY June 2006

Brit. /tkst/, U.S. /tkst/ [In sense 1 < TEXT n.¹ + -ING suffix¹. In sense 2 < TEXT v. + -ING suffix¹.]

1. Music. - You'll have to subscribe to get this definition.

2. The action or practice of sending text messages from one mobile phone to another. Cf. TEXT MESSAGING n.

1999 Business World (Philippines) 22 Jan. 33/1 Texting has become so popular that it introduced a convenient new communication channel. 2000 Elle Sept. 58/1 When involved in a texting or e-mailing rally, try not to be the last to send a message. 2005 N.Y. Times (National ed.) 9 Jan. I. 1/5 [He]..loves to send and receive pithy text messages via cellphone... He often prefers texting over talking on his cellphone.

Visit the OED's home page at www.oed.com

Thanks...

2008-02-06T19:17:00.000-08:00

... to Jorn Barger for a link at Robot Wisdom.

Twitter observations

2008-02-06T19:03:00.000-08:00

Following the twitter Public Timeline I observe:

Most of the messages are posted from the web or from other client applications, not "from txt".
There's very little txt talk, even on the posts from txt.

Are folks using predictive text because they're all on the bleeding edge? Are they really good at it? Is txtspk, and by extension, TTOTD, passe?

Twitter

2008-02-04T13:35:00.000-08:00

I'm trying out Twitter as a way to get TTOTD on a cell phone.

Google the term + the definition

2008-01-30T04:44:00.000-08:00

A good way to discover usage and find new terms is to search for a texting term and it's definition.

For example, today's post: ne1 & anyone

Trying ZapTXT

2008-01-23T12:34:00.000-08:00

I tried ZapTXT a few days ago. Not so good for this application. In the SMS message I get the term (3 times!) but no definition:

FRM:W/E
SUBJ:W/E
MSG:01/23/ 08:51
W/E

In addition to SMS it will deliver to email and IM.

Trying Yahoo! Alerts for RSS to SMS

2008-01-19T09:39:00.001-08:00

It must be hard to do RSS to SMS. I say this because I haven't yet found anyone who does it well.

I tried Pingie, but all I got from it were ads.

Now I'm trying Yahoo Alerts.

It will send an RSS or Atom feed to both email and SMS.
The email messages include promotional links for itself, but not other ads.
They don't make it easy to sign up for arbitrary feeds - the only way I found to do it was to create an alert button for the fee -
It's not that easy to sign up. They support only a small number of cell phone carriers: I had to guess between to AT&T/Cingular services, and then I had to pick a specific model of phone. Mine wasn't listed, so I had to guess at one.
It doesn't include the post title in the SMS message, only the content:

y-
alerts@yahool.
com()Y! Alerts: Long
Time No See, Long
Time No Chat

It's not perfect but that's what I'm using, at least for now.

About

2008-01-19T07:52:00.000-08:00

Here I will post my experiences and thoughts creating TTOTD.