Or as Business Week puts it: "With words being created, put to use, and accepted in the blink of an eye, they're becoming a challenge to the reference world's gatekeepers." Makes sense; the Web's a challenge for traditional gatekeepers of all sorts. Whether it's vlog, crog, mash-up, Astroturfing, googling, or IMing or some other newsly coined Web term, dictionary folks can't rely on the old standard of frequency of publishing to determine if the word is, well, a word.
"Telling the difference between a true word and a nonword was once as easy as reading. Time was, a cluster of sequential letters constituted a word if it appeared in printed sources a few hundred times or so over a few years and had an accepted meaning. Not anymore. The ease and speed with which people publish their lingo online has diminished the ability to judge a word's worth by its written frequency. Within a few short months, a new slang term may appear on thousands—if not millions—of Web pages and blogs, Pitoniak says. Even a misspelled word can return thousands of Web pages on a Google search."
