AP Takes to Social Media Web site Website to Make Change

In perhaps one of the most overdue changes in the information age, the Associated Press changed its convention from “Web site” to “website” last week.  While it is not unique that AP changes style on a certain term, one of the multitude of platforms is used to announce the change was a Tweet:

“Responding to reader input, we are changing Web site to website. This appears on Stylebook Online today and in the 2010 book next month.”

Within a few minutes, it was a trending topic, and a number of my own contacts were discussing the development.  Do we need any further evidence of the pervasive nature of social media?  As social media think tank Mashable stated in its post discussing the change:

“We’d actually gone rogue on the issue ourselves several months ago, thinking that ‘Web site’ was a rather antiquated way for describing ‘a computer connected to the internet that maintains a series of web pages on the World Wide Web.’”

Given the fact that AP’s statements in the wake of the change seem to indicate that its readership requesting this change was quite the chorus, the guys at Mashable are not alone.

Even major publications like the New York Times are recognizing that the nature of language is evolving in the direction of lower case letters and simplification.  Technology editor David Pogue stated in an <del>e-mail</del> email to Poynter Online:

“The trend in tech terminology is ALWAYS toward lowercase and no spaces or hyphens. ‘E-mail’ is rapidly giving way to ‘email.’ ‘Inter-office memo’ became ‘interoffice memo.’ (Actually, that’s the trend in all English: ‘extra-marital’ becomes ‘extramarital,’ ‘pigeon-hole’ became ‘pigeonhole,’ etc.  On the other hand, if enough publications all start using the lower case and the no-hyphen (sorry, ‘nohyphen’) term exclusively, then eventually, the public will stop tripping over them, and we can all move ahead in sync!”

Indeed, the information age is omnipresent, and it seems to live by the credo that less is more.