Kerrie Murphy | July 15, 2008
DEFRAG has long been convinced that IT journalism would greatly improve if it took more cues from women's magazines.
Don't be afraid, be very afraid
What Defrag does barely qualifies as journalism, more a grave warning of the results of watching too many superhero cartoons as a child.
But we digress. The world of computers, mobiles, PDAs and the internet is ripe for a chick-mag makeover.
Each month we'd see stories with headlines such as "104 new positions for your chassis", "Lose kilos (off your laptop)" and "Making a Connection: when to let down your firewall".
So in the spirit of things, the topic of today's column is What Your Search Engine Use Says about You.
Blogging for ABCnews.com, Hitwise general manager Bill Tancer noted that we were afraid. Very afraid.
Apparently, there has been an increase in searches that use the term "fear of" lately.
Now, when we heard this, we assumed that this increase was a direct result of the iPhone release last week and people were searching "fear of having my arse bored off by an iPhone owner who can't shut up about its features" but it seems it's just Defrag who harbours those concerns.
No, according to the article, in order of popularity, the most commonly occurring words accompanying the phrase "fear of" in a search query at the moment are: flying, heights, communism, intimacy, clowns, dying, commitment, darkness, death and germs.
Defrag looked at the list and was so puzzled by it that we had to go and buy some fund-raising chocolate and a diet beverage and then spend half an hour reading GoFugYourself.com.
OK, it may have not been puzzlement, but ease of distraction.
Why does communism rate so high? Are people from the 1940s using Google? Should that list also include "fear of people from the 1940s time-travelling to the present and using our search engines to solve their problems"?
Just as the Martians in War of the Worlds couldn't handle Earth viruses, people from the past aren't equipped to handle the ways of the internet. Unwitting exposure to a meme like rickrolling could kill them.
Then there's fear of clowns.
It's not that we don't get a fear of clowns, because the very sight of one causes Defrag's skin to attempt to crawl off our body and hide in a corner, but fear of clowns more common than fear of death?
We're afraid of clowns in case they try to kill us, so that ranking doesn't make sense.
Perhaps it's because fear of dying and fear of death are counted separately.
It would be like having entries for fear of clowns and fear of clowning - there's a difference between the two things, but in the scheme of things you don't want to encounter either.
Still, when Defrag's campaign for more women's mag writing in IT journalism gets going, we fully expect that list to change. Fear of your hard drive looking big in that is bound to hit No4.
TOP 10
This week:
A survey by Travelodge in Britain finds that techies get less sleep than most other professions. Here are the top 10 signs a techie is too tired.
10. Zzzz...zzzz.
9. They still haven't got around to downloading FireFox 3.
8. The usual can of Red Bull for mid-morning break has crept forward to as soon as they get out of bed.
7. They still play World of Warcraft, but all their avatar does is sleep.
6. You can't even get a rise out of them by saying Windows is superior to Linux.
5. He or she becomes two-tiered.
4. Their head hits the keyboard and what appears onscreen makes sense.
3. They're only working on one project at a time since opening and closing all those windows requires too much effort.
2. They haven't the energy to mock non-techies' understanding of computers.
1. They're polite and helpful.
Contributors: James Nelson, Don Knowles, Joe Curtis, Keith Cundale, Emma Crane, Alan Cluley.
Next week:
A piece of malware spam had the subject line: "Third World War has begun". Send us the top 10 signs someone gets all their news from spam. Answers by Thursday to OzDefrag@Gmail.com