Solicitousness and solicitation

It’s always interesting when a word that is similar to another word is used incorrectly—sometimes it’s interesting in a good way (when done intentionally), sometimes not (as in intentionally).

While doing a perusal of new social media service offerings, I found (via Social Media Examiner) Back At You, a “self-service marketing platform” that helps you create, run, and analyze social media campaigns at a reasonable price point. It’s a good idea, so I spent some time on their site.

When I came to their blog post of August 29 (the most current post when I visited), I was amused to find the following sentence regarding inviting Facebook friends to a fan page: “Don’t overdue it as you might upset your friends for being solicitous.” In addition to the inadvertent misspelling of “overdo” (perhaps the blog post itself was overdue), I expect the writer meant something more along the lines of solicitation. Being solicitous is a good thing: it means showing interest or concern in something or someone or being eager to do something. I wouldn’t mind if a Facebook friend posted solicitous messages on her wall. Solicitation, of course, means asking for or trying to obtain something; or, as my police officer friend would tell me, it means offering one’s or someone else’s services as a prostitute.

The more proper terminology here, I think, would be commercial, something like “Don’t overdo it as you might upset your friends for being too commercial.”

Despite some missteps in spelling and usage, I would recommend taking a look at Back At You’s services. After all, they’re not selling copyediting tutorials.

Moving on

For those who read these posts (you lucky few), be on alert that the bulk of my blogging will soon be done on our design shop’s new website at www.infusionmediadesign.com. We’re working furiously on the redesign/redevelopment, and we hope to see it open for business by fall at the latest. I’m going to keep this blog up for a while, perhaps for a long while, and maybe even forever (however long that may actually be).

I’m also working on implementing a new theme for this blog, something cleaner, only because I feel the need.

Curating content

This isn’t the first time I’ve read about content curation, but Steve Rubel’s talk at Mashable Connect 2011 is one of the most concise and yet in-depth discussions of it I’ve come across.

Briefly, for those not familiar with the term, content curation is, according to David Meerman Scott, “…the act of pointing your followers to content from other people. …Essentially the idea is that you find things that interest you and share them.” Retweeting; using Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to share an interesting blog post, news article, or video (that you did not create) is curating content.

In retrospect, it’s the inevitable development of the real-time, overwhelming nature of digital content—the constant river of information that threatens to overflow your memory banks. Rubel calls this the “Validation era” of the Internet, when users are seeking the “signal in the noise” and “hold[ing] on to only those pieces of information and people that are most important to them online.”

I’ve long thought that the main value of the Internet, and particularly social media, is the ability to find and share good information. I like telling people about my pet’s foibles as much as the next person, but as entertaining as that might be, they’ll likely find more value in my sharing an article or post on marketing or book design or even the latest doomsday craze. At least that might affect them personally, unlike my quail’s latest attempt to eat an ant.

 

UPDATE June 14, 2011

Turns out there is quite a commotion about the use, or misuse, of the word curate. A nice comment on the topic can be found on Grammarphobia; Jim Crawford of Crawford PR has a particularly potent post on the subject, where he also targets monetize. While I usually fall into the prescriptionist camp of editors (versus descriptionist—a lively debate that people outside of editorial circles are missing out on), I must admit that perhaps I’ve become lazy and am accepting new word usages without thinking through their implications.

Of course, I’ve also decided that in most cases the term web, when referring to the World Wide Web, need not be capitalized, and that’s really moving into strange territory for a copyeditor who generally swears by Chicago and AP.