In the following video from The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference in June 2010, lexicographer and Wordnik CEO Erin McKean demonstrates how Smartwords allows someone to get lengthy definitions for technical terms, buy books on searched concepts, and get quizzed on words for the college entrance exam (hat tip to VentureBeat).

Link to video

The video below from O’Reilly’s TOC Conference (Tools of Change for Publishing Conference) in February 2010 is disappointingly vague, but the main point is that the Smartwords platform lets you learn (about words):

• where they are and
• where they came from
• when they are
• how they relate to other words
• who created them and
• who they’re with now

I take this to mean the contexts, connotations, collocations (words that co-occur), and other connections among words. I would dub this “Word Con 4,” but one is a col- and it might also sound like a word conference or a lexical DEFense CONdition for shooting language-maven missiles (after eating and before leaving) at people who misuse too many words.

Link to video

These are exciting times for how we access words and information. Once we reach the immersive hologram phase I suppose tagged words will have avatars to come by and explain themselves to us. “Wrestling with” a new concept could cause injuries without proper safety protocols, and “wrapping your head around” an idea might make for an unflattering online video of you.

Side note:

Erin McKean (her Twitter) uses delightful analogies. Below are two talks she has given about dictionaries.

2007 TED Talk on redefining the dictionary

Link to video

2007 talk at Google on what one should know about dictionaries (almost 55 minutes)

Link to video