OK, contest time. Let's find the future word for microblogged statements.
Is there a way to run such a contest in such a way that every suggested word is automatically free for all to use forever (unless it was trademarked before)? I almost fear no :-(
On the other hand when I tried to trademark a word in Germany, it was rejected because it was deemed too common (I didn't think so, but whatever). So maybe if one could make a case that, say, the word "mext" was already a common name for microblogging statements, nobody could trademark it for that anymore? Just when is it common enough - winning a competition would probably be insufficient?
A short, genericized name for the category is a good idea.
The existing descriptions -- 'status updates', 'activity streams', 'microblogging' -- are awkward for casual/verbed usage.
Possible veins of meaning to mine include:
* similarity to instant-messaging, but more public -- Public Instant Messaging, or PIMming. "I pimmed it." "Check out my pims on Facebook, Twitter, or Laconi.ca."
* similarity to loud-talking -- "shouting". (Could be a prefix letter to IM, as above, to "SIMming" or "SHIMing", or given an e-prefix like e-mail, "e-shouting".)
* conversely, similarity to talking to oneself -- "mumbling", mumble-IM ("mimming", "mimbling"), e-mumbling. (It's interesting that the activity is like both shouting and mumbling in different ways.)
* similarity to 'texting' (as I think your 'mext' example alludes to) -- public-texting ("pexting"), loud-texting ("lexting"), txt-blogging ("togging" or "tlogging"), blog-texting ("blexxing").
Is there a way to run such a contest in such a way that every suggested word is automatically free for all to use forever (unless it was trademarked before)? I almost fear no :-(
On the other hand when I tried to trademark a word in Germany, it was rejected because it was deemed too common (I didn't think so, but whatever). So maybe if one could make a case that, say, the word "mext" was already a common name for microblogging statements, nobody could trademark it for that anymore? Just when is it common enough - winning a competition would probably be insufficient?