One of my favorite sites on the Web is dictionary.com because I often forget what a word in my head really means. I also love the sister site of thesaurus.com because I marvel at the subtle shades of meaning that surround a word. Many people swear by the Visual Thesaurus as the preferred synonym finding experience with all the swoopy perkiness of it all, but you know how I really feel about that kind of super-fatty digital content ... at least on some days. For a good conundrum, try typing in "thinkmap" into the Visual Thesaurus and you will find that there are no search results—I would expect "thinkmap" to at least relate to a "thesaurus." Maybe they'll change that after the word gets out. Or maybe that's their strategy. I'll find out eventually.
Reason why I am on the topic of dictionaries and thesauri (I had to look up that pluralization on thesaurus.com) is that I saw one of my favorite online ad banners. It's the one with the basketball players waving their hands in an entire stadium of raucous observers and you're being propositioned to shoot the ball and maybe win an iPod! Given my propensity for shiny things, I couldn't resist.
Then as the online kleptomaniac that we all can be, I wanted to download the ad to my local computer for later use—perhaps to show in one of my classes. However I couldn't. A quick look at the HTML revealed the following three-line JavaScript snippet:
1 var bnum=new Number(Math.floor(99999999 * Math.random())+1);
2 document.write('<SCR'+'IPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" ');
3 document.write('SRC="http://ad-company-server/site=130928/
size=468060/bnum=' +bnum+'/optn=1"></SCR' + 'IPT>');
Of course I'd already known of these kind of simple micro-transactions that keep good things afloat on the Web, but I never took the time to look at the simplicity of their design. First line of code gets a random number and pops it into the computer's pocket named bnum. Second line of code blesses the upcoming JavaScript incantation. Third line is the main meat of the spell, "Conjure up from ad-company-server a banner ad of size 468 by 60 pixels, from this site that is ID-ed as number 130,928, and the particular ad I want is to be related to the number I have in my computer's pocket bnum." With this simple computer spell, I notify my client, I let them know how big a billboard I'm giving up on my site, and I've approved of showing a random piece of advertising. All with just 3 lines of code! To think that 25 years ago all my first 3 lines of code could do is print my name in a repeating loop ...
10 REM MY FIRST PROGRAM
20 PRINT "MAEDA"
30 GOTO 20
We certainly have come a long way in terms of bang for the buck per line of code. However with advances in more powerful computer languages and the expanded latitude of expressions capable in the future, I'm betting that we are not far off from having programming thesauri. Ambiguity that is artfully embedded in computer languages is the next step in computing. But meanwhile, we can aimlessly click on sparkly online ads while we wait for that to happen ...
The incredible power and effortless transplantability of online ads makes them the perfect "cockroach" of the Web. Simple in design, rapidly re-producing, adaptable to any living situation, and disliked in many of the same ways we hate cockroaches. Online ads will not only probably outlive us, but will soon live among us. Get comfortable wearing your antennae, folks!
Dominic Slinn in the UK recommends using the following tools as alternatives to my own picks: omnidictionary and
nisus-thesaurus. I just took a look at them and they are specialized Mac applications. I prefer to do my work on the Web over the Web in a platform agnostic way. I think because I change computers so often that I never want to have to install any software. I hate to install software, don't you?