Just another day in the Valley...

...Silicon, that is.

This is a rather special part of the world. Northern California, the San Francisco Bay Area. Home to Apple, Intel, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, eBay and such-like. Doing what I do for my day job, not a bad place indeed.

And then there are the billboards along 101.

"Virtualization alone does not a cloud solution make."

I mean, that beats ads for the local bank or some television show, right? It doesn't even matter if you don't understand it. Just the sentence alone marks this place as different.

Then there are the Dice ads that have shown up recently.

$ curl 'tech jobs' SanFran
// Don't tell my boss

or another one I saw:

if(!coolBoss) {Dice.Search("San Francisco");}

Now, these have caused some disturbance in the tech community - mainly to do with the lack of correct syntax. An example of such unhappiness is here. Still, I find them fun.

However, today I spotted one in which ad promised to "gamify" your organization, assuring the reader that the company doing the advertising was a "leader in gamification".

That was a new one on me. Having done a little research I now understand it a bit more. But the ugliness of the term. I can't get past that. I do see the need for the invention of terms to encapsulate new concepts.

But the simple changing of a noun, "game", and making some form of verb of it, "gamify", strikes me as a short-cut. An example of marketing leaving the world and the language a little uglier.

But, that's just me.