Misspelling

From Memography

Misspellings have a long history in the development of unique brand names and the shortage of top-level domain names on the Internet has accelerated their creation.

Misspellings take us into the enormous space of strings that lie outside normally spelled language. If infinite strings were allowed, we could note that the space of randomly assembled strings is infinitely larger than the strings confined to normal language (itself infinite of course, thus all those monkeys in the British Museum.)

Memography wants to make some use of that infinite space. Thus the relevence of misspellings.

Consider the leading folksonomy site, Flickr. Dropping the "e" gave them a domain name.

RSA are encryption gurus who call a product "SecurID." Besides misspelling, it sounds like security. Nice name, but Peter Morville points out that if you search for "SecureID" on the RSA website, it returns only a single page, where SecurID returns thousands of hits. Google, who seems to know more about RSA products than the RSA search engine, uses synonym expansion to suggest, "Did you mean SecurID?"

Peter also points out that Ross Mayfield of SocialText created a tag on Flickr called "indicatr." Ross was using the same technique of getting outside normal words to exploit the added precision and recall you get from memography's globally unique meme IDs.