MOG

I want to like MOG, I really do. The music-based social networking site, its name a derivation of “music blog,” has a welcoming and homey aesthetic. If MySpace is a cheesy pop-music arena concert, then MOG is an intimate indie-rock show.

The site’s personality starts with the playful copy (a rotating top-nav tagline says things like “a musical nudist colony” and “where the hokey pokey ‘is’ what it’s all about”). The primary design elements are curvy and earthy brown. Once you register, you can wiki it up and create your own MOG. But the extent of customization is limited—you can move around and delete widgets and change your skins, but widgets only fit into certain spaces within the three-column layout and skin selection is limited, unless you want to go through the trouble of creating your own.

Unlike many social networking sites, you can add a Mogger as your friend (“My trusted Mogs”) without that person necessarily adding you (“Mogs that trust me”). Trust is based on knowing a Mogger, or simply finding their writing and/or taste in music interesting.

Founder David Hyman is MOG’s Tom. He’s your default friend when you sign up, and he acts as the site’s emcee, the community’s leader. He impels conversation, warns about updates and interrupted service, keeps users apprised of new features—he even invites Moggers to parties. He is also the face of apology when something goes wrong. (A few weeks ago, when Facebook Platform was unveiled, an industry-shaking move that opened up Facebook to outside developers, MOG had a hard time adapting. MOG was unprepared for a load increase of over 3000%, and the site slowed to a crawl as a result.) Hyman (even with such an unfortunate name) is genuinely likable, someone whom you want to pat and say “there, there” to when something goes wrong.

MOG’s motor is the Mog-O-Matic software, which scans a user’s hard drive for music files and tracks members’ collections. Mog-O-Matic keeps dibs on music files added and how often files are played, extracting the data into site widgets for other members to see. To me, this is the boon and bane of MOG.

Without Mog-O-Matic, the site’s recommendation engine—a primary component of MOG’s appeal—wouldn’t exist. Music lovers would discover each other through what they say they listen to, and not what they actually do listen to. But it’s all a little too Big Brother for me. And I’m sure I’m not the only: Who wants that kind of virtual invasion? Who wants to intentionally install tracking software, regardless of its innocuous purpose?

But I think even beyond that, the concept of MOG is fundamentally flawed: It tracks songs played on your computer. What self-respecting music lover uses their computer as their primary music player? And if you’re going to argue that you’d install it on your work computer, where you listen to music all day long, I’ll call bullshit. Do you keep your music collection on your work computer? Do you even have install privileges on your work computer?

In spite of these limitations, MOG has created an endearing music community. And even if it never achieves a MySpace-size fan base, there’s always room for a warm nook for audiophiles on the web.

 

O RLY?

As a former editor and proofreader, Internet shorthand drives me crazy. Around 1994, during my early chat days on AOL and a local BBS called City Paper’s CityNet, I remember thinking that using UR and OIC was just ill communication, the lazy chatter’s plague. It was the online equivalent to a bad southern accent; it (unfairly) inferred dumb. (Sorry, Tennessee!)

But that’s changing. Internet language is morphing, creating whole new dialects, the etymology of which is pretty fascinating.

For instance, Leet is a language all on its own, born from gamer/hacker/BBS speak in the 80s. “Teh” (a Qwerty typo we’re all guilty of) and “Pwn” (meaning “to soundly defeat an opponent”) are Leet words that are starting to move beyond their cliquish roots and into the mainstream lexicon. Characters on South Park and in the movie Employee of the Month used “pwned.” And, while not exactly Leet, in 2002 the phrase “All your base are belong to us,” a nonsense expression outside of its original gamer context, was suddenly ubiquitous.

Each niche parcel of the web seems to inspire its own glossary of words and phrases. Social networking sites like MySpace, for instance, spawn language that’s not ungrammatical, but makes sense only in its online context, such as “Thanks for the add” and “Friend me.”

The most recent lingo phenomenon is lolcats language. If you haven’t yet, check out the super awesome lolcats essay that appeared recently on Slate. In it, author Michael Agger attempts to dissect the language:

Blogger Anil Dash wrote about the unusual grammar of lolcats, speculating that it was a “pidgin language, used to help cats talk to humans.” A reader pointed Dash to a San Francisco Chronicle article about MeowChat, where people maintain cat identities online and speak in a cat language that slightly overlaps with lolcat speak. (Genius detail: Some cat lovers disdain MeowChat because it implies that cats are not intelligent, evolved creatures.) Mark Liberman at Language Log posited the best theory, arguing that lolcat was more like kitty baby talk, and cited a 1922 passage from The Clicking of Cuthbert by P.G. Wodehouse: “Little Tinky-Ting don’t need no liver-pad, he don’t,” said Mrs. Luella Mainprice Jopp, addressing the animal in her arms, “because he was his muzzer’s pet, he was.”

I don’t use so much Internet speak in my daily, verbal life. Yet. But I can feel the slang moving from my screen to my mouth every time I say the phrase “BRB.”

PS: NetLingo has a great list of acronyms and shorthand for those of you confused by those precious cell phone commercials.

 

Here I go again

I’ve started and stopped a number of different blogs. This one? I’m keeping. Here I go.