Wordsworthy

I've notice a recent upsurge in the use of -worthy as a superlative suffix. A local radio station - The Buzz - refers to music as being "buzzworthy". Too many additional examples to even mention here. (And how the heck do you Google for words with particular suffixes? Anyone heard of Google working in a substring search? But that's for another time ...)

I believe that this is a direct result of the popularity of Seinfeld and the word "spongeworthy": from brainyencyclopedia.com:

spongeworthy - that a potential sexual partner is particularly attractive; in the original episodes, being "spongeworthy" meant Elaine was willing to use one of her limited supply of (no longer produced) contraceptive sponges with this person.

I'd love to be able to trace the development of word usage using daily Google statistics -- but most of what I'm interested in (other than entirely new phrases like "jump the shark") are trends in things like punctuation and usage that are difficult to Google.

Of course, every time I think "Hmm, Google would be cooler if ...", they've usually got it on Google Labs before I can finish the sentence. :)

The Future of Social Networking?

Some of the new social-networking crop (Friendster, Tribe, Orkut) are a superset of the dating standbys (match.com, eHarmony.com, etc.). The technologies seem to be all collectively wanting to converge towards something that fluidly combines the best features of IRC, email, personal home pages, IM, match.com, blogging, and those Japanese devices that beep when you get close to someone who shares your interests.

What will this magical PSA (Personal Social Assistant) look like? As it sits today, all of these sources make me want to write an aggregating front end to replicate similar data to its various sources -- sort of like Trillian on uber-steroids. With a standardized XML-ish format, perhaps something RSS-like ("Real Simple Socializing"?)

Now if I could only get my PSA subcutaneously implanted and automatically route stills of approaching people to facial recognition software so that their name appears on my heads-up sunglasses ... :)