Dino Baskovic Can’t Lose

Bridgett Baron, a successful business owner who runs “The World According to Bridgett” website, asks for my humble opinion about hyphens, hash signs and other typography yet to be hallowed.

Blog topic: The recent resurrection of the @ symbol, after generations of neglect. What long-overlooked keystroke is next?
12:42 AM Jul 29th via web in reply to ProfessorDino

Great question, Bridgett. To be honest, I’ve never been thrilled with people using the at sign to reply to tweets. Twitter explains how the at sign came into use in its early years, and you can’t blame them for adopting a community standard. Still, at signs are supposed to be for email addresses! (Insert old man's voice here.) At least this has always been my impression, and I imagine this confused many Twitter users. “So the at sign doesn’t mean email here, but if I put the at sign in front a Twitter name, the other Twitter-er can read what I wrote. So it’s like email, right?

It’s worth noting another pair of punctuation marks prevalent on Twitter:

• The # hash sign. Before social media, this was a number sign. Over the last few years, it has become an acceptable method of tagging tweets, similar to tag clouds on blogs. Twitter now recognizes a hash mark in front of a keyword, generates a searchable hyperlink and viola—a “hashtag” or hash tag, depending on which style guide you use. Or styleguide. It never ends…
• The ^ caret. Also used to denote exponential numbers, the caret is used by teams of people that simultaneously manage a single Twitter account as a way to identify “who tweeted what.” The most common application is ending the entire tweet with ^XX, replacing XX with the person’s initials. Twitter is yet to apply any treatment to carats within tweets.

Back to your question, Bridgett. I’ve given this some thought and dug around a bit to see what’s bubbling. I didn’t observe widespread use of any other punctuation outside of normal grammatical usage. So, here are some ideas I have for symbolic contenders and my pick for the next big new mark:

The question mark. How does every question start in Spanish? With an inverted ¿ question mark. Granted, most languages don't require double enclosure for interrogatives, but I do envision some kind of mobile service that immediately recognizes a question preceded by either mark and ignites an artificial intelligence engine:

? fastest land mammal
Cheetah.

The exclamation point. Writers use—and abuse—this mark to emote excitement. Process engineers see this and think “DOES NOT INCLUDE.” Technical publishers use this for caution flags, warning alerts or error signs. I can see a GPS-enabled, crowdsourced highway alert system where a witness to a road incident could message the following:

! accident I-75 N exit 83 "2 cars fire injuries"
REC. Responders will be notified if not already en route to scene.

These last two examples assume some SMS-friendly short code that sticks to 140 characters. But what if we have room to spare? What if there’s suddenly a shoe sale, this Saturday only, the store opens at 6 a.m. and heck, why not throw in free rolls?

OMG There is like this crazy !!!sale on shoes at Macy’s at Monmouth Mall!!! and Cinnabon is giving away free, like, buns or something which, no way, that is totally uncalled for THIS temple of a body. Like I can afford cankles when I can barely afford !!!Zanotti platforms at $449!!! but CHECK THIS GURLZ they are like stupid cheap this Saturday if you get there before 9 which is WAY early I admit after a Friday night, HELLO??? but whatever you get a $50 credit and ANOTHER $100 off any pair over $199 and $200 off two or more pair! That is what I am talking ABOUT. Drag your butt out of bed and we’ll get !!!ZUMBA!!! over with and do lunch. C U!

In this, um, colorful example, three exclamation signs in repetition encapsulate text strings as manually inputted by the user (similar to Textile). Each string is converted to a search keyword or tag and then made visible to said shoe freak’s inner circle:

Nicole P.’s red tags for today: 
sale on shoes at Macy’s at Monmouth Mall
Zanotti platforms at $449
ZUMBA

Related tags:
Macy’s [map] [web]
Giuseppe Zanotti [web] - SPONSORED
Monmouth Mall [map] [web]
Cinnabon [map]
Zumba Fitness NJ [map] [web] - SPONSORED

The dollar sign. It may no longer be the strongest currency on the planet, but the dollar symbol is universally recognized as a representation of money. Computer geeks know the dollar sign for regular expressions, prototype classes and variable indicators. Huh? Sorry Bridgett, but I speak geek. So how to marry money with programming moxie? Maybe by saving hapless spenders and converting them into would-be coders with this command-line budget tool:

$earn=2000.$bills=1000.$save=300.$invest=200 > calc y
Your will earn $48,000 in wages this year. After paying $24,000 in bills, saving $3,600 and investing $2,400, you will be left with $18,000.

That’s a pretty simplistic example, I admit, but you get the basic idea. Assign dollar amounts to variables concatenated together with dot signs (periods) to make a formula. Simple algebra. Memorize a few basic text commands to do stuff with the variables (in the above theoretical case, calculate a simplistic budget over a period of one year). Advanced users could apply compound interest, amortize loans and such by adding parenthetical percentages. Shuffle around the variables to create various financial conditions. Before you know it, you are “scripting,” or running basic programming shortcuts without even realizing it. Google Labs gave us a similar feature to convert currency and measurements as well as perform simple arithmetic by entering arguments and operands as search terms. Imagine a social hub implementing this feature, then sharing the results with your network. Better yet, watching them trend and reaping a wealth of knowledge from your friends’ community-driven computations.

I could go on, Bridgett. Wildcard asterisks, greater-than and less-than signs, titillating tildas, simple ampersands, backward slashes and so many brackets, so little time. But not everybody wants to be a junior programmer and punctuation is about as dowdy a discussion as one can get. Besides, this is social media! It’s supposed to be fun, engaging, power-to-the-people and what mobs say goes. So what do I really believe is the rookie symbol sensation?

Plusses and minuses. Simple, really. A plus sign means you like or approve something. A minus sign shows dislike or disapproval:

Dino Baskovic +buffalo wings –ranch dressing

…which is true. I dip my drummies in blue cheese, not ranch. The best part about using plus and minus signs? No special skills are necessary. Nor is any extra integration required of social networks, unless they choose to adopt them as standards. I think the online community could embrace these given the propensity to rate and review everything under the sun. Everybody inherently understands that a plus sign means positive, a minus sign negative. “Signing” could even become iterative:

+blues +Chicago –harmonica –augmented_scale

In this case, you are stating that you prefer Chicago-style blues but not the harmonica-laden sounds of the South Side, nor at the typical augmented synthetic scale proffered by jazz theorists. In other words, you are a righteous jazz snob (not you personally, Bridgett). You get your point across with simple plusses and minuses, with a little Boolean logic to boot. Pandora picks up on it and behold: instant uppity jazz mix.

So there you have it, Bridgett. I hope you plus this post.

I'd solicit Megan Taylor for her resume, if that wasn't such an embarrasing thing to ask for these days.  That's what LinkedIn is for.

Ms. Taylor (I don't know her personally, so I'll default to formal) is the the type of candidate that would play well with the other kiddies in my own corporate sandbox.  That being, a PR department that mixes business with social media.  It's hard to find folks that know web, journalism and communications, those that are solid writers, designers and developers and can actually think, well you know, strategically.

Her resume lists the following skillsets:

AP Style and news editing, HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, Flash and ActionScript, beginning PHP, JavaScript, AJAX, content management and online community management, audio/video editing, Adobe applications, Windows, Mac OS, Microsoft Office, Final Cut Pro, fluent in Spanish

I used to laugh heartily at resumes that laundry-listed talents like this, moreso when I would read job postings for triple-majors that "must know three dozen programming languages, usability, information architecture, art and architecture, landscape architecture, gardening, needle-point and can bowl a perfect 300 game."  Then again, a four-year college degree these days is the new high school diploma...

More on Ms. Taylor and why she caught my eye.  She's interned for Quinn and The Miami Herald, as well as blogs for Poynter and PBS.  Not too shabby.  Her latest blog post entitled "In Search of the Perfect Skillset for a Programmer/Journalist" really hits home.  I, too, am one of those oddball, cross-bred communicators that can both code and copywrite while standing on my head.  What a rush.  It's what got me started in PR, doing freelance web and at one time, teaching both.  I owe my (near) success to my chosen career path, and when I'm not knee-deep in budget or crying over my lost Facebook account, I have a moment to myself to blog.

"In Search of" highlights practitioners of what Ms. Taylor refers to as "computer-assisted reporting" or CAR.  In short, CAR is a relatively new concept, seemingly driven by investigative online reporting and the proliferation of citizen journalists who can tweet train wrecks faster than your average multinational media conglomerate.  The post further explains that CAR types (I'll call 'em that) should have a fair amount of front-end design, LAMP stacking and geomapping under their belt, and throw on some Flash and Final Cut Pro to boot.  Oh, and lest we forget: content management, publishing, editing, writing and the basic tenets of credible and ethical journalism.  (I'll assume she implied that last part.)

The upside to CAR, from my point of view, is that you would most likely be the smartest and most capable member of the newsroom/startup/coffee shop.  You know that much.  The downside?  You probably won't get paid that much.  It discourages me to think that an entry-level CAR type, even with glowing references and a stellar portfolio, may only fetch $40K-60K/year.  Maybe less.  Just five year ago, that number would be double.  And we didn't have fancy web frameworks or a plethora of Web 2.0 widgets at our disposal (read: to learn and try not to break).

I'd be curious to learn more about CAR and whether PR types (like me) should be mindful.  Even more intriguing, what your run-of-the-mill CAR type makes in a year, or per blog post, etc.

And Ms. Taylor, if you're reading: love the resume.  How do you feel about Grand Rapids?