Monday, July 25, 2005

Er, that wasn't what I had in mind...

After my recent coinage of "philogram" to mean a friend you know only virtually through electronic means (such as blogs or chat rooms), I decided to see if the term had taken root.

Imagine my surprise to find that www.philogram.net exists ... but for some reason didn't come up on Google when I coined my term. And, what, pray tell, is philogram.net?

It is a Korean SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) site. I can read Korean (no, I'm not joking), but my reading is very slow, and much of this is too technical for me to read at any speed. I searched the site a bit to try to figure out why they called it "philogram," but I can't find any reference in the earlier posts. Unfortunately, I can't get my non-Korean version of Word to do a search for me on Korean words, so I've got to do it the old fashioned way, by eye.

In any case, their blog pre-dates my coinage by about 6 months, so they must have had *something* in mind. Occasionally, someone misspells "phylogram" to denote a phylogenetic tree, but their SETI site doesn't seem particularly biological.

Odd.

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