Nitpickin’ again, I see …

Although one of the greatest nitpickers was the late Paul (Dodo) McKenna Davis of The Montreal Star, he was also one of the greatest copy editors I have ever had the pleasure to work with in my career.

Meanwhile, don’t get your Strunk and White into an uproar against these cubs who pimp the language in the world’s second-oldest profession, and simply tweak your outdated AP style book to accept a scrolling marquee of dot-com ignorance.

May I also remind you of the current and popular meaning of “hacker?”

This word was once used with some compassion to describe a particular trait of certain gifted individuals who could expose the many secrets of hardware and software. Today, it has become a much-maligned definition twisted and tortured by spin-doctors who dwell beneath a bridge and in the corporate darkness of angels and demons.

A “page-view,” as described, is simply not a connective accepted by Johnny Mnemonic and the virtual regiment of editorial bladerunners on the Web. It just ain’t sexy, sweetheart, and only used, or so it seems, by the clowns of commerce in marketing and advertising.

But, then again, (we) had created this ambiguous conundrum in our own industry, didn’t we?

Define, if you will, the circulation figures of The Daily Rag?

I couldn’t agree more. Nothing proves better ones glibness of the Web than when they use hit instead of page view. Hit is a real term, and as you pointed out, it means something else.

Even page views don’t tell me that much without knowing visitors, uniques and time spent. A lot newspapers have built their sites to essentially game the system. They only put a few hundred words on a page and force a user to click to another page to read more of the story.

Advertisers aren’t that stupid.

And users hate this.

@David,

It’s not about getting with the times. It’s about misusing one term for another. Both have relevant uses.