AP Lays Down New Guidelines for Usage of Social Media Terms

The Associated Press has released some guidelines pertaining to social media terms and usage in the new AP Stylebook; some changes are long overdue, and others are a bit of a headscratcher. For instance, “website” is officially one word now (as is webcam, webcast, and webmaster), and e-book and e-reader is hyphenated. However, the AP has decided that “smart phone” should be two words, which is a bit perplexing considering the one-word version has picked up quite a bit of momentum on the Web.

The AP has also included a section dedicated to text messaging acronyms. Many of them will be familiar to those who have an unlimited texting plan or spend a lot of time on Twitter, but there were a couple that seemed unfamiliar:

IMHO — In my humble opinion

POS — Parent over shoulder (Not what you were thinking, right? This is a way for teens to alert their friends with whom they are chatting that a parent is approaching the computer screen.)

Other interesting updates include:

Fan, follow, and friend are defined as “actions by which users connect to other users on social networks,” and all three terms are accepted as nouns and verbs.

The term “click-through” is hyphenated and is defined as a “way of measuring how many people click a link online to see its destination site.”

Google, Googling, and Googled are now accepted as “informal verbs” for searching on the Internet.

These are just some of the new additions to the AP Stylebook; there are many more interesting definitions worth checking out.