It’s a republication from last September but a worthy one, today’s Op-ed art on the back page of the New York Times’ This Week section – iPanic: Helping you deal with the loss of your life savings, one app at a time. “The fetish that’s a phone on the only network that’s an option gets even more practical, with apps for navigating your newfound destitution.”

You either get it or you don’t. And if you do, you gotta get it:

Once Google Sites got added to the Google Apps suite, Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) almost immediately made the decision to migrate away from an existing MediaWiki installation to Google Sites to host its existing intranet content. Then and now that intranet location has been called the “Shared Private Network.” Within LSNC, everyone pretty much just calls it the SPN.

Since the tech team at LSNC (in-house known as “Team Gizmo”) believes in change you can, uh, believe in, they thought it would be a great idea to give LSNC staffers the opportunity to rename the SPN. And what better way to do it than have a contest (with a grand prize of a $30 Amazon.com gift certificate) open to all staffers, to submit their suggestions for a new name.

Game on!

Over a three-week contest period, Team Gizmo received a total of 47 suggestions for renaming LSNC’s shared network, including a late entry for which the time limit was waived because of the “quality” of the submission. Relying on contest standards that make American Idol look like the Nobel Prize, Team Gizmo brought its best “arbitrary and capricious” A-game to the task of reviewing all submissions.

There’s good news and bad news.

First, the good news: There was a winner, the who and why are explained, below. The bad news: Change is hard. Notwithstanding the number of submissions and the identification of a bona fide winner, the consensus (including the winner herself) was that no one came up with a name and/or acronym better than what has been used for so long, namely, Secured Private Network or SPN.

But, wait, there is the funny news: LSNC staffers largely approached this contest as an opportunity to showcase their sense of humor and delight with acronyms. Among the lessons learned:

• Some senior managers clearly have too much time on their hands. One of them submitted more nominations than anyone else. We are compelled to acknowledge here his best suggestion: Ecretsay Tuffsay from LSNClay. (Yes, that was his best suggestion.)
• There were several nominations suggesting some staffers are watching too much television, especially niche or defunct channels, like ION (Inter-Office Network) and UPN (Ultimate Private Network), which no doubt would have been well received if Star Trek Captain Janeway were a member of Team Gizmo. She’s not.
• Without naming names, the LSNC Auburn Office is apparently busting at the seams with galactic vision, with its suggestions that included CSN (Cosmic Stellar Network), SCN (Stellar Cosmic Network), LSNCU (LSNC Universe) and PLSNC (Planet LSNC). No doubt the Auburn Office will be closed on May 8 for interplanetary repairs.)
• That only scratches the surface of the many clever acronyms LSNC staffers came up with. Among more serious ones were LINE (LSNC IntraNet Experience), PIN (Private Information Network) and SNAP (Secure Network All Private). But there were a slew of funny ones, as well, including IPHOM (I Pay Homage to the Machine), LOLS (Lots of LSNC Stuff) and a hearty bottoms-up to PILSNER (Private Intranet Legal Services Network Employee Resource).
• Some of the best submissions weren’t about acronyms, they were just… well, you decide:
  • CASPER, as in the friendly ghost. I have my reasons.
  • www.thisisthegreatestthingihaveeverseenandicouldnotlivewithoutit.com
  • The No SPN Zone
  • … and a personal Team Gizmo favorite: That thingy online where we get all the stuff

The winner? It came from a bookkeeper in the Finance Department, who submitted SPUNK (Super People United as Networked Kin). Are we going to use it? No. That said, it is a funny, clever and catchy acronym that melds notions of intranet purpose and functionality with an empowering sense of organizational esprit de corps, don’t you think?

Bottom line: The best $30 tech investment at LSNC. Ever.

(with permission, but anonymously to protect the guilty)

Not to worry. We have several posts coming over the next two weeks on TFP taxonomy and file-naming conventions. But in the interim, here’s a bit of found humor, part of a test search done today as TFP’s Team Gizmo preps for a program-wide meeting next week about technical aspects of the project and various document protocols. This is a screenshot of a temporary portal page created for one of the demos we are doing at that meeting:

OK. Admittedly, I may just be a touch punchy on an early Wednesday evening, but here’s the search result for “Where’s the love” … out of a test-bed repository with about 300,000 documents in it:

Yep. One document: The text of a hearing transcript on a Vacaville “mobilehome rent stabilization ordinance” which includes testimony that “I believe there’s a sign that says to pick up after your dog, and there was a sign that said ‘We love our residents,’ and those are the only two signs that I’m aware of.”

Sorry, folks. That’s all the love Google was able to find in our document repository.

Privacy. It’s a recurring topic of obvious concern to folks. Of note, a useful overview article a few days back from Mark Glaser of PBS MediaShift fame: Your Guide to Online Privacy. The article includes familiar riffs on the privacy impact of search engines and social network sites, as well as a useful list of “privacy sites” and “privacy manifestos,” if you’re into that.

Less useful in a practical sense but emblematic of the editorial tone of a lot of the MediaShift content is an even more recent, only so-so post about 5 Videoblogs That Do It Right. Personally, I don’t have it in me to prioritize web video feeds as part of my cognitive daily diet, but I have to give props to MediaShift for picking up on video cult comedy fave Ask A Ninja, who are responsible for, among other things, an especially authoritative review of Pirates of the Caribbean.

The New York Time today answers the pivotal question of our generation: Who’s a Nerd, Anyway? Yes, your deepest suspicions about this special, self-selecting but familiar human subspecies are confirmed, but with sociological twists: “They often favor Greco-Latinate words over Germanic ones (‘it’s my observation’ instead of ‘I think’), a preference that lends an air of scientific detachment. They’re aware they speak distinctively, and they use language as a badge of membership in their cliques” and “are not simply victims of the prevailing social codes about what’s appropriate and what’s cool; they actively shape their own identities and put those codes in question.” I will confess to having taken four years of Latin in Catholic high school (that’s just what you did then, OK?) but I have never commented on anything by saying “it’s my observation….” Truth be told, as a person who manages technology I have publicly protested at our internal tech meetings against any reference to me as a nerd. Given my Irish ancestry and the specific county origins of my family, I insist proudly I am the Dork from Cork. Deal. (Geek references are optional.)

This just in: “NBC has given the go-ahead to just one new comedy for the 2007-08 season, according to reports. The network has ordered 6 half-hour episodes of The IT Crowd, a sitcom set in a computer workplace. Based on a UK format – a second series airs soon on Channel 4 – The IT Crowd has been earmarked for a midseason launch.” Promises to fill in the gap long left empty since the departure of Nick Burns.

And since we’re talkin’ Gmail today, for those who missed the Google joke last week about Gmail Paper, here’s what the Gmail no-longer-there “welcome” page looked like last Sunday. Being a one-day joke, Google by the next day had changed the Gmail welcome page back to its original state but, as it does with this sort of thing, has memorialized Gmail Paper for all web time.