[Air-l] Poll on annoying Internet neologisms

[Casey O'Donnell]

It appears that the "poll" was not in fact a poll... It seems.

- Casey

http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/06/making-the-news.html

Making the News
June 25, 2007

The gist: A lighthearted unscientific poll that was created as a PR
ploy for a tech company is quickly evolving into a "real" news story,
being treated as fact by mainstream press. That evolution from
marketing effort to established fact can have real impact on people
who works in related fields. This phenomenon is worth examining
because, while this fairly harmless example hasn't resulted in a lot
of drama, it shows the pattern that underlies a lot of the drama that
tends to pop up in web communities.

....

On 6/22/07, Dan Prives <dprives at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's this story going around about a supposed poll to determine the
> most annoying word produced by the Internet.
>
> I found it here (AFP -> Yahoo news):
>
> http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070621/tc_afp/britaininternetlanguage
>
> and here (Telegraph.co.uk, Sally Peck) (excerpt below, if you care
> about the results of this alleged poll)
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/22/wiphone222.xml
>
> However, there's no mention of this poll on the YouGov.com web site,
> nor on lulu.com nor or lulublookerprize.com.
>
> Did this poll really happen?
>