Do you get sick of playing “join the dots” when it comes to verbally stating website URLs and email addresses?
How much time, in a day, might the average blogger, or anyone for that matter, WASTE constantly including all those DOTS in their speech?
Here’s what I mean, let me “pronounce” my URL, or website address:
www DOT disassociated DOT com
And then an email address:
nospam at disassociated DOT com
And what if you have a sub domain, or country extension as part of your URL?
www DOT disassociated DOT com DOT au
Or
nospam at disassociated DOT com DOT au
All these DOTS are really beginning to annoy me! Imagine if you were verbalising these things all the time, maybe as part of your job?
The “net” has been in mainstream “use”, for what, 15 years now? I know the concept of the web predates the Moon landing, or something, but I’m talking about the time the net has, more or less, been an every day part of the average household.
URLs and email addresses are hardly a novelty any more.
So isn’t it time we changed the verbal, or spoken, naming convention? We all know the DOTS are part of the deal in any URL or email addy, so why waste our time saying them?
The only time I should have to use the DOTS is when I am speaking to someone who is new to the concept of the net.
And there wouldn’t be too many people in that category by now, given the day-to-day exposure everyone has to URLs and email addresses, by way of media (TV, radio, newspaper) advertising, and the like.
Even children growing up will most likely find themselves already “preconditioned” to, and familiar with, the conventions by the time they become net users.
So it’s:
www disassociated com
And:
nospam at disassociated com
Ok?
Save the DOTS for full stops at the end of dotty blog posts like this oneDOT
can we get rid of the www as well. what a waste of syllables.
DOT doesn’t really take that long to say. It sounds pretty garbled without the dots. It may get confusing when urls are not proper words.
…the dot association is to prevent webcrawlers from grabbing spam emails. Do people actually verbalize their url?
@Dave - yep that could work also, save a few breaths!
@Audio Mecca - dot dot dot - waste of breath :) As a net savvy person (and that’s who I am referring to here) you’d understand I how to access the URL disassociated com, wouldn’t you?
@Tab - I am referring to the spoken word here… I verbalise my URL every time I call my web host, to people I meet at social events (if I’ve run out of cards), and sometimes in random day to day conversation. I do find myself telling people my email addy a lot though, and people giving me theirs over the phone or something.
I think it’s about time we ditched the ‘www DOT’, but bypassing the ‘DOT’ before com/net/org/info etc. doesn’t work too well with the English language. Sure, it’s something we could all get used to, but I don’t really see it as a trend which would really take off in a hurry. Besides, it’s only an extra syllable. Perhaps removing the ‘DOT com’ from .com emails would make sense. If I where to say my email address is “PhilGibson@gmail”, then one could easily presume it ended in .com since that is the most common domain type for emails, and I did not state otherwise.
Reverting to what I said at the beginning of this post though, I’m very surprised people still verbalise the ‘www DOT’. It seems highly unnecessary in this soundly webbed age of ours.
I’m very surprised people still verbalise the ‘www DOT’ that much at least could be done away with! :)
Yep I could definitely get what you mean by disassociated com. Well, I guess its just a trend that is not going to die soon.