Wednesday, 8 August 2012

Urban Dictionary as a source of brand and product names

A logical extention to commercialising memes, is the commercialisation of new language as it arises. Fortunately this data is already collected, in numerous online glossaries, most notably Urban Dictionary for slang.

As with commercialising memes, the key is to identify rising words before they become too mainstream, and before they begin to die. Word popularity is easily obtained from hits to the online glossary, and from Google trends.

There is an opportunity for the online glossaries to cash in on their data, selling to companies and marketing agencies information on rising words, filtered by relevant categorisation and relevant definition. (Of course, Urban Dictionary would probably want to filter out some of the ruder definitions...)

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