Louisville Technology Acronym Bee (LTAB)

Recently we were excited to learn of a very cool fund-raising event for the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL), based in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Peak 10 Louisville Technology Acronym Bee (LTAB) is similar to the numerous successful corporate spelling bees held in communities around the nation every year. However, instead of spelling obscure words, adults participating in LTAB define obscure technology acronyms! The participants are made up of corporate teams and compete for a winning title, prizes, the LTAB Champion Trophy Cup and bragging rights. All of the proceeds will benefit Louisville’s own nationally recognized National Center for Family Literacy.

The Third Annual Peak 10 LTAB was held on October 20th at Louisville Slugger Field. More than 200 peole attended the event that raised more than $15,000 for the National Center for Family Literacy. For the third year in a row, Appriss Inc. won the competition against a field of 21 corporate teams. Click here for a photo.

We're very interested in becoming a sponsor for this event in 2006. Watch this space!

Another new spam-related acronym: Splog

There's a new variation of spam appearing, called splog. Splogs are blogs created purely to promote a product or website, in other words, spam.

I noticed this the very first time I used Google's relatively new Blog Search. I got hundreds of hits from "blogs" that were nothing more than scraped content published in a blog. This will be a very serious problem for blog application providers, blog publishers and blog search engines. Google's own free Blogger/BlogSpot has become a haven for spammers who use blogs for spamming purposes. Google's Blogger API made it possible for spammers to recently create 13,000 splogs, creating huge problems for blogosphere search engines and users alike.

Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal about splog: 'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google

Here's another recent article from eWEEK: Blog Spammers Take Aim at Google

The other spam-related problem with regard to blogs is the link spam or comment spam; visitors (or bots) leaving spam comments or links on legitimate blogs.

The term is described in more detail at Wikipedia

Seen a UFO lately?

OK, who hasn't heard of UFO meaning Unidentified Flying Object? We just added a new definition for UFO today. In this case UFO stands for United Flying Octogenarians.

UFO is a national organization of pilots in their eighties. The organization was started in California in 1982 with 16 charter members, who, unfortunately are no longer with us. The group currently has almost 500 members all over the US, but also has members in Canada and several other countries. There is also a growing number of women in the group. The oldest actively flying member will turn 100 in December 2005!

UFO is now informally run by retired Air Force member Herbert Sloane in Montgomery, Alabama. Mr. Sloane estimates that the total number of flying hours of all members of UFO is probably over 500,000 hours. Now that's what I call experience!

UFO has a brand new website, but as I write this, it doesn't have any content yet. You can visit United Flying Octogenarians at http://www.unitedflyingoctogenarians.org/

New Feature: Single definition links

We've added a useful new feature to Acronym Finder's search result page. Next to each acronym or abbreviation's meaning, you'll see a small link image/symbol. If you click on that image, you'll be taken to a new page showing only that single definition in a simple, uncluttered format.

What's this for? If you're writing an article, message, or forum post and want to link to Acronym Finder's definition for an acronym in your text, you can use this page/URL to show only the specific definition (rather than showing all the results). This allows you to unambiguously define a term.

Once you're on this page, you can also search for that definition in Google. And we've provided a one-click feature to make a TinyURL(tm) so you can easily provide the link to someone else. And of course, you can see other Acronym Finder definitions for the acronym on the page or you can do a new search.

Also, you will automatically be sent to the single definition page if we have only one definition for an acronym.

Here's a TinyURL demonstrating what this new feature looks like. Enjoy!

New Contributor Hall of Fame member: Paul Monlezun

Congratulations to new Contributor Hall of Fame member Paul Monlezun!

Paul hails from Ottawa, Canada and works as a Public Affairs/Government Relations Consultant.

Paul has contributed an enormous number of Canadian government, associations, labour unions, political, industry groups, etc. and has a very sharp eye for finding errors to correct in our database.

Our Hall of Fame is a very small and exclusive group, but their combined contributions account for a very large percentage of our database.

Thanks Paul and keep up the great work!

Acronym Finder in the News

Recently, Acronym Finder has been mentioned in some cool places.

We made The Daily home pages A-List Best of the Web for Wednesday, October 5, 2005 (archived here). Thanks to Terry Patterson for pointing this out.

Stan Horzepa (WA1LOU), at the National Association for Amateur Radio (ARRL) wrote an article "Surfin': Got AAIs (Abbreviations, Acronym and Initialims)?"

Finally, Acronym Finder was a USA Today Hotsite on September 9th, 2005.