Sharknado and the Zombie Apocalypse
Thoughts from our VP of Services, Ben Speca
I was asked by Vertical Solution’s Marketing team to write a “blog”. To be truthful, this word has always made me laugh. It makes me think of a kid in my neighborhood who was extremely tall and thick. He would lay around under a shady tree in the summer doing nothing. We’d be short a player for some type of sport, and he wouldn’t move and could care less. At some point, his nickname became “Big Log” – like a big tree laying in the woods. Sometimes the terms kids generate for their friends are far more imaginative and identifiable than the genius we present to the public as technology professionals.
Just like everything we do in technology, the term “blog” comes from the shortened slang of the original term “weblog”. In a very short period of time, “blog” has become entrenched into our lexicon and dare I say our very culture. It was first used in 1999 on a technology insider website – peterme.com. From that point forward, it spread like a virus to where Bloggers.org estimates there are 31 million active bloggers in the United States alone. Even my mother knows what a “blog” is!
I think a lot of us in this business and have attended conferences and heard sentences like: “We are creating transformative solutions in which our outside the box thinking is on the very bleeding edge converging big data so our growth hacking is blowing up social graphs and creating technology that is truly disruptive.”
Disruptive, Bleeding, Hacking? Really… Sort of like Sharknado? Do we need chainsaws and Ian Ziering to implement this? In all seriousness, I understand why we create these exciting terms. It’s sort of like a Ted Talk mixed with a little bit of a Steven Jobs new product reveal to change minds and gain interest.
It has always been a mystery to me why unique terms and a special vocabularies are created as a way to speak about what is essentially tools provided to make business run more efficiently, more securely, and without disruption. We are own worst enemy, we end up being the zombies at the door muttering out words that most likely elicit an intrinsic fear of the unknown. And then, we present ourselves as Sheriff Grimes, and tell our clients they must follow our lead to survive. The value that we as IT professionals provide is truly in taking some of these complicated concepts, software, as well as devices and present them in a manner that they are understood, accessible, and embraced by the businesses needs to which is truly our duty.
In a sense it is simple; it is and always will be about communication. Let us speak in terms that our clients can envision and have realistic expectations as to the benefits we propose. There will always be crafty new words that stay around, and “blog” would be one of them. My hope is that the clever technology vernacular we use make enough sense that a client can easily make the correlation between a big tree lying in the woods and large lazy boy laying in the shade.