The American Dialect Society (ADS) has named google - the verb - as its Word of the Decade. According to the ADS, the verb google (meaning to "search the Internet") won out over blog, which, according to Grant Barrett, the chair of the ADS's New Word Committee, "just sounds ugly." Tweet was named the top word of the year for 2009. Fail - "a noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful" - was 2009's most useful word. Sponsor Definitions: Tweet : noun , a short message sent via the Twitter.com service, and verb, the act of sending such a message. Google : Verb meaning "to search the Internet." Generic form of the trademarked "Google," the world's dominant Internet search engine. Fail : A noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful. Usually written as "FAIL!" The ADS's members include linguists, grammarians, etymologists, writers, editors and university students. The ADS was founded in 1889. Twitter and other social networks have clearly captured the imagination of many language societies. Twitter was the top word of in the Global Language Monitor 's survey, and unfriend was the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2009 Word of the year. To represent the 1990s, the ADS picked Web as the top word of the decade. Do You Agree? What do you think? Do you think google deserves to be the one word that represents the last decade? Or is this just another example of how Google is succeeding in its slow takeover of our culture? Discuss

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Google: The Word of the Decade

According to recently released research from the Pew Center , we're just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet's first boom cycle. At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye. Sponsor Over a five-day period, the Pew Center interviewed 1,504 American adults and asked them to weigh their feelings about culture and technology over time. The respondents' answers are enlightening. While positive feelings outweigh negative ones for almost every cultural epoch from 1960 until 1999, our feelings about the 2000s are predominantly unhappy. Fully 50 percent of respondents have an overall negative impression of the past decade, while only 27 percent said they felt positively about these years. However, almost across the board, technological advances in basic online and mobile communication tools have been a bright spot in our shared perception of this decade's progressions and events. Cell phones, email and the Internet were viewed very favorably among all types of Americans, and online shopping and smartphones evoked positive reactions from a majority of respondents, as well. Blogs and the social web, however, earned a solid "meh" from those surveyed. It is worth noting that the greater a respondent's age, the less likely he or she was to view these technological changes positively. For example, 45 percent of folks between the ages of 18 and 49 - a huge demographic - saw social networking websites as having positive effects on our society. But after the 50-years-old mark, that percentage lowered significantly to between 25 and 21 percent. It's also interesting to note that the dot-com crash hasn't effected our late-nineties optimism about where the Internet would take us. Most of us still feel, as we did in 1999, that the Internet is having an overall positive effect on Americans. Again, these responses were subject to age. Around three-quarters of younger respondents saw the web as a positive change, but only 42 percent of people age 65 and older felt the same way. But these older Americans didn't seem to think the Internet was necessarily negative, either. Their responses indicated that they were unsure of its impact or thought its influence was negligible. Another correlation in this opinion was between a positive view of the Internet and a college education. A full 82 percent of folks with a college degree said the web is doing good things for America. For more details, read the full study , and do let us know in the comments what you think of the 2000s and where the Internet will take us in the 2010s. Discuss

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A Decade of Innovation: How We See the Internet 10 Years After the Boom

It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440. Just as Johannes Gutenberg's printing press brought books to the mainstream public in the 15th century, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web brought commercial publishing to the people. Sponsor The Web has always been a medium where people could just as easily write as read (yes, the read/write Web ), however it didn't reach its potential until blogging came along earlier this decade. Blogging Blogging not only allowed anybody to publish easily to the Web, it ended up shaking up the print media world. Blogging began in the 90s as a form of online diary - Rebecca Blood wrote a good pre-history in 2000. One of the early popular blogging services was Blogger.com , launched by Evan Williams (who subsequently became a co-founder of Twitter) and Meg Hourihan in August 1999 . The service was acquired by Google in February 2003, a couple of months before ReadWriteWeb began. At that point, 2003, blogging was still seen as an informal diary-type of publishing. Around 2004-05, blogging started to become accepted as a legitimate news source. This was around the time that ReadWriteWeb began to publish tech news, as well as analysis. By the end of the decade, many blogs were directly challenging newspapers - proving that a solid news brand, such as Huffington Post, can be created from almost nothing in a few years. RSS Blogging software was one part of the democratization of media. RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") was another. There were and still are different versions of RSS , created by Dave Winer and others. But whatever the flavor, syndication has had a major impact on media. Basically RSS allowed people to subscribe to updates from blogs and other publications. Using RSS Aggregators, people could read news from a selection of niche and general news publications. Blogs were the first to utilize RSS, but mainstream media followed during the 2005-06 period. Today it is very rare for a major news website - whether it be the New York Times or a leading blog - not to use RSS. Twitter & The Real-Time Web The next major development in news media occurred towards the end of this decade. It was of course Twitter and the Real-Time Web . To be fair, this has challenged not only traditional media - but blogs as well. Now anyone, whether they're a writer or not, can publish 140 characters to the Web. And it might end up as breaking news, as the Hudsen River plane crash proved earlier this year. Media in the Next Decade There is much talk of the mainstream media "dying" and blogs usurping traditional media companies like the New York Times. While it's true that blogs sometimes report breaking news stories or analyze them better than newspaper websites, I'm a big believer in the power of brand. Washington Post, Wall St Journal, New York Times - these are all powerful brands and they reach a much wider audience than the vast majority of blogs. The challenge of course for mainstream media is to (drastically) reduce their costs, because few people want to pay for content these days - news or otherwise. However, in my view the traditional news media industry is in much less danger of extinction than the music industry . Musicians can bypass record labels completely nowadays, but there will always be a need for news to be questioned, put in context and analyzed. The best media publications of the next 10 years will do that and be successful, the ones that don't will fade away. See also: Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music Discuss

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Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media