What the Hell is This Thing?

Welcome to the Street Tech B.S. Detector ("B.S." as in "Buzzword Saturation," if you were wondering). Anyone who's familiar with Street Tech knows that we're dedicated to "hardware beyond the hype," exploring the latest tech through straightforward evaluations and frank discussions of what sucks and what doesn't. Part of our job involves slogging through steaming piles of manufacturer and dot-com press releases that are often the antithesis of honesty and plain English. Buzzwords, techno-babble, bravado, and waist deep b.s. abounds. We decided to start collecting the...ah...best of these user-surly press releases (along with other offensive words and phrases found on other tech review sites). With our b.s. dictionary in hand, we've built a machine that can process content fed into it, rating the level of b.s. it contains. PR people and lazy tech writers everywhere: Behold and fear the Street Tech B.S. Detector! We've got your number.

How it Works?

Easy. To get the B.S. Detector to process a website, insert your cursor within the defaulted Web address on the detector (www.streettech.com) and double-click to select it (note that Mac users may have to put the cursor after the defaulted address and press the delete key to erase what they need to of the address) and then type in the address of the site you want the Detector to analyze. You must leave the "http://" in the address for the Detector to work properly. To enter a longer address, go to the Web page you want to analyze, copy the address to your clipboard and then hit the "Click Here to Paste from Clipboard" button on the B.S. Detector, then press "Start."

Important Note: You have to hit the "Restart" button after each B.S. processing cycle. And we also want to apologize about that annoying Director security dialog box. If you know how to defeat this, please let us know.

To input a word processing document from your desktop (e.g. that press release you're about to unleash on all of us), copy it to the clipboard and then press the "Click Here to Paste from Clipboard" button, then hit "Start."

After the machine has searched through the content and compared it against our snazzy B.S. dictionary, it will display a final reading. These readings are:

Smells like Roses (0-3 B.S. terms or phrases found)
Ground Cover (4-7 B.S. terms or phrases found)
Knee Deep (8-12 B.S. terms or phrases found)
Waist Deep (13-20 B.S. terms or phrases found)
Up to Your Eyeballs (21 and Over B.S. terms or phrases found)

Who Created the Dictionary?

The B.S. Detector dictionary was assembled by Gareth Branwyn, creator of Street Tech, Wired's Jargon Watch Editor and a special consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary on computer and online terms. He went through all of the press releases he gets at Street Tech Labs, scanned websites for user-surly English and took suggestions from Street Tech staff and site visitors. The dictionary currently has some 300 words and is growing all the time. The amazing Tim Tate is responsible for dreaming up the idea for the device and programming it. Interface and design genius Jim Leftwich is responsible for the cool machine graphics.

Is This Just a Novelty?

Yes and no. Right now, the dictionary doesn't weigh the words and it will not likely ever be context-sensitive. For the next version, we will rate each term based on our subjective (though not entirely uninformed) opinions about which words are more offensive than others. Since the words are not weighed, and since we didn't want to get into arguments with people over whether a word should be in the dictionary or not, we have suppressed the outputting of the offending words with each analysis. With version 2.0, the list and the weights will appear in the analysis window. But this doesn't mean the B.S. Detector is not useful now. If you input text or a Web address that comes up with a high B.S. reading, go through it and weed out the unnecessary hype and technobabble yourself. All of us in the tech writing and PR fields can benefit from this.

You Can Actually Learn Something

Even though version 1.0 of the Street Tech B.S. Detector is crude, it instantly proved its usefulness to us in a surprising way. Between the two big tech news and review sites, CNet and ZDNet, we'd always assumed that CNet was the more hype-ridden. In fact, CNet, and their "It's all good" approach to personal tech was a big inspiration behind our "hardware beyond the hype" approach at Street Tech. But running the Street Tech B.S. Detector on the two sites, we have consistently found that ZDNet is MUCH more b.s.-laden than CNet. We now have a bit more respect for CNet (at least their online tech writing - their TV shows are another story) and a lot more suspicions about ZDNet's reviews.

If you have any questions or comments about the Street Tech B.S. Detector, please email Gareth at: garethb2@streettech.com.

Now, back to the Street Tech B.S. Detector!