Sunday, March 18, 2007

refi : metafilter in review: Refi: Naming and Namespace Collisions
Regular readers of Metafilter know more than one name for the site. We call it the blue, after the color of the front page (so lazily cribbed for the design of this very blog). We also call it mefi, because that's a 60% savings on keystrokes.
And the other sections of the site—ask.metafilter is the green or simply askme, and Metatalkthe grey (or as some people have asserted in the past—we'll keep an eye out for this—the brown) or simply meta. Any of these can be seen rendered in lowercase or with
is punctuating capitals—MeFi, AskMe, MeTa—though I think this is most common with MeTa, being as how the lower-case rendering "meta" is a bit confusing without explicit context. right. nice sum.
(There's also Projects, which is a newer part of the site. The newness of the section, the
weird-cousin difference in functionality from the rest of the site, and the lack of any particularly euphonious coining: I suppose these factors taken together explain why there's no generally accepted nickname for Projects yet. I've heard "MePro" once or twice, but that's not exactly a winner. Projects was also called the red for a while, but after a number of complaints Matt opted for a less retina-searing dark teal. And the dark teal just doesn't stick.)
this writing is good. very capable. by Josh Millard. knows the words for things. I am esp glad for "punctuating capitals."

But before I requested from Google such specificity, my first query was for, simply, "refi". This, I thought to myself, is a nonce construction, an odd jamming together of letters that has no meaning. Right?
Well. Hoom. This is where it becomes clear that I do not have a mortgage: I have, as consequence, never considered refinancing. As such, I've certainly not gotten so used to talking about my refinance plans that I would feel compelled to adopt a useful (if twee) bit of short-hand like refi.
There's also a Polish (I'm guessing) blog at refi.blog.pl. Anyone who can read the language is welcome to let us know what, precisely, is going on there with the pictures of adorable children hmhe and the dearth of paragraph breaks.

refi : metafilter in review: May 2006:
My hope, with Refi, is to take a good systematic look at joe-average Metafilter threads over time—essentially, examine threads that have no particular motivation toward self-examination and see what's going on in there.
So here's the plan: sample mefi history, talk about what's there, who's there, and what the hell everybody is talking about and how. great. Maybe some armchair discourse analysis thrown in. Maybe even directed graphs of conversational branching. posted by Josh Millard at 8:16 AM

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