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Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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« "Ancient" books | Main | People power on the computer » Tuesday, February 27, 2007New 'social' dictionaryYesterday saw the launch of WordSource, a new online dictionary that incorporates crowdsourcing: Users can rate words (?!), upload photos, add tags, and so forth. You can look up words by typing them into the address bar of your browser. Intrigued, I looked up "metempsychosis" by visiting http://word.sc/metempsychosis. Now, it might be a fine idea to add a social element to an online dictionary. But WordSource's "tagging" function is just silly. It permits users to tag any term with a preselected phrase, including: I failed my English test when I spelled this word wrong. This is the perfect word in my eyes! I love the arrangement of letters in this word. Quite frankly, this word bores me!Yech, why bother? The idea seems to be to create the MySpace version of a dictionary. Just what the world needs. For the sake of experiment, I tagged "metempsychosis" with the pre-selected phrase "This word is always on my mind." (I'm guessing nobody else will do that.) And I created a hangman game. I also uploaded a photo -- I was urged to use a photo of a person, and to include the word "WordSource" in the photo -- of my puppy. If it shows up on the page later today, we can officially close the book on this silly experiment. Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:03 AM
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