The case for Elert

A few weeks ago, Amy Gahran, of contentious.com, started a con­test to find a new nick­name for RSS. I sub­mit­ted Elert as my entry. Today, I found that it’s one of the top entries in terms of votes but I need help get­ting it to the top. This is where you, gen­tly read­ers, come in. Please vote for Elert!

Here’s why I chose this par­tic­u­lar name as my entry:

• First of all it is short. By com­par­i­son, peo­ple talk about the “web” instead of the “world wide web” so any nick­name needs to just roll off the tongue.
• Sec­ond, it has to rep­re­sent the con­cept: When I get a tip from an RSS feed, what am I get­ting? First, I’m get­ting a reminder that some­thing new has been posted. In some cases, it’s a por­tion of an entry, in oth­ers, it’s the whole entry. In either case, I am alerted to the fact that new con­tent has been posted. This alert comes elec­tron­i­cally, hence the replace­ment of a sin­gle let­ter to form the new elert term. An elert is an elec­tronic alert.
• Why no web men­tion? Well, I thought of that one for a while, as the term web has been more elas­tic of late but I went back to the early days and the web is only one com­po­nent of the Inter­net. Sure, the RSS feeds are gen­er­ally dis­trib­uted over HTTP but does that make them part of the web? I would ven­ture that no. Much like email can be got­ten via web­mail, or Usenet can be reached via a web inter­face, they rep­re­sent a dif­fer­ent set of appli­ca­tions. The same is true of RSS (or Elerts) as those feeds can be read through a web-based inter­face (like Blog­lines, my favorite RSS reader), or through an indi­vid­ual client. How­ever, no browser natively sup­ports RSS yet (I believe it’s only a ques­tion of time, though).

The con­cept of the con­test was great and I hope that every­one will join in (and that most peo­ple will sup­port Elert as the coolest entry)