Tag: SMILEY

Twenty Five years ago, a clever University professor added a colon to a right parenthesis and thus changed the course of human events. Ok, maybe we're overstating the social and cultural impact of the emoticon but, you'll have to admit, love them or not, they're everywhere. Scott E. Fahlman dreamed up the sideways smiley in a discussion about how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. The ...

The New York Times ran a lengthy article on emoticons this weekend. It's a must read for anyone who can decipher this symbol ~(_8^(I), or for anyone who can't but would like to. While the Times gives a brief history of the emoticon, with the first modern usage traced back to 1982, the juicy bits involve the creep of emoticons from casual conversations into the professional arena. For example, if ...

The latest post at the Ask.com blog begins, "For a long time people have wanted the ability to search for terms and phrases on the web using non-letter (A-Z) characters. Put another way, searching using non-alphanumeric characters." This is a promising start--I've occasionally been annoyed by the fact that Google interprets almost all non-alphanumeric characters as spaces--but then things go off ...