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DENIZENS of the Twitter-verse, please be advised: Whether you are a Libyan celebrating the demise of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, a New Zealand office worker sleepily starting your day or a California teenager trying out the latest slang, your words are being analyzed.

Twitter is many things to many people, but lately it has been a gold mine for scholars in fields like linguistics, sociology and psychology who are looking for real-time language data to analyze.

Twitter’s appeal to researchers is its immediacy — and its immensity. Instead of relying on questionnaires and other laborious and time-consuming methods of data collection, social scientists can simply take advantage of Twitter’s stream to eavesdrop on a virtually limitless array of language in action.

Read the article in the NY Times.

Punctuation arouses strong feelings. You have probably come across the pen-wielding vigilantes who skulk around defacing movie posters and amending handwritten signs that advertise “Rest Room’s” or “Puppy’s For Sale.”

People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.

Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.

Read here the article by Henry Hitchings

Wie kent hem niet? Het groene wezen Yoda uit de Star Wars-films en zijn typerende manier van spreken. Vandaag de dag klinkt dit taalgebruik ons vreemd in de oren, maar 50.000 jaar geleden spraken mensen op een manier die veel wegheeft van de wijze waarop Yoda zijn zinnen formuleert. Dat suggereren twee taalkundigen in het tijdschrift Proceedings van The National Academy of Sciences.

Lees het artikel hier.

Google’s recent improvements to its search-ranking algorithms, codenamed “Panda,” have just rolled out in all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The changes are intended to reduce the effect of “content farms,” sites that churn out lots of low-quality content to skew search results in their favor. Reports show that Panda appears to be working; the biggest content farms have shownmarked decreases in traffic since Panda first launched in the U.S.

Read here the rest of the article.

Friday is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the IBM PC. While it wasn’t the first personal computer ever built, its basic design was the foundation for nearly all PCs that are made today. While IBM no longer makespersonal computers (it sold off that business to Lenovo years ago), Microsoft decided to celebrate the launch of the IBM PC a little early with an article on its official blog site today.

Written by Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Corporate Communications, the blog points out that the IBM PC also launched with Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system which started Microsoft’s rapid rise to the top of the technology world. Shaw writes, “Thirty years ago, Microsoft believed that making technology less expensive and more widely available would open up amazing opportunities for people and organizations to achieve their dreams. Our fundamental belief that democratizing technology can change the world continues to drive everything we do, and as technology and society have changed over the last 30 years, our vision for how technology can change the world has evolved as well.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Oh, now THIS is lovely. The Save the Words site, dedicated to keeping underused words alive, launched back in 2009, but I’d forgotten about it until the Guardian’s own Chris Moran forwarded the link to me this morning.

“Each year,” the site tells us, in tones more usually employed on advertisements exhorting us not to buy puppies for Christmas, “hundreds of words are dropped from the English language. Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives, but now lie unused, unloved and unwanted.” At this point, having whipped its readers into a state of tearful guilt, it announces that “you can change all that!”. An adoption scheme is proposed: you choose a word, and then sign a pledge, stating “I hereby promise to use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to the very best of my abilities.”

Read the article here.

The year was 1907, and legend has it that President Theodore Roosevelt had just finished a cup of coffee at the Hermitage, the Nashville home of President Andrew Jackson, when he declared it “good to the last drop.” Ten years later, the folks who brewed the cup, a company called Maxwell House, made the former president’s coinage their official slogan. Some 90 years later, it still is.

Like diamonds, great slogans last forever. (As a matter of fact, De Beers’ rock solid “a diamond is forever” line is 64 years old.) Still, some of the most popular brands change their slogans annually. Forget nine decades. In the last nine years, Dr. Pepper has experimented with a dozen slogans around the world.

Click here to read the rest of the article in The Atlantic.

When Pepsi launched in China, so the story goes, the translation of the slogan, ‘Come alive with the Pepsi generation’, promised consumers something a little different.

Could Pepsi really bring their ancestors back from the dead? The result was apparently a dip in sales.

While this has never been properly substantiated, according to urban legend-busting website Snopes, Pepsi has never denied it.

Be that as it may, companies across the globe have come a cropper moving into foreign markets.

Braniff Airlines, for example, once offered Spanish-speaking passengers the opportunity to ‘fly naked’ rather than on leather seats.

But for businesses operating online, the push to be multilingual is hard to ignore.

Research commissioned by the European Commission found that 82% of consumers were less likely to buy goods online if the site was not in their native language.

Globally, research firm Common Sense Advisory found that 72.4% of consumers were more likely to buy a product with information in their own language.

Read the whole article here.

IMAGINE, if you will, a young Mark Zuckerberg circa 2003, tapping out e-mail messages from his Harvard dorm room. It’s a safe bet he never would have guessed that eight years later a multibillion-dollar lawsuit might hinge on whether he capitalized the word “Internet,” or whether he spelled “cannot” as one word or two.

But that is exactly the kind of stylistic minutiae being analyzed in a lawsuit filed by Paul Ceglia, owner of a wood-pellet fuel company in upstate New York. Mr. Ceglia says that a work-for-hire contract he arranged with Mr. Zuckerberg, then an 18-year-old Harvard freshman, entitles him to half of the Facebook fortune. He has backed up his claim with e-mails purported to be from Mr. Zuckerberg, but Facebook’s lawyers argue that the e-mail exchanges are fabrications.

When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers. But how reliably can linguistic experts establish that Person A wrote Document X when Document X is an e-mail — or worse, a terse note sent by instant message or Twitter? After all, e-mails and their ilk give us a much more limited purchase on an author’s idiosyncrasies than an extended work of literature. Does digital writing leave fingerprints?

Read the rest of the article here.