The generic web

Two years ago I noticed that Wired News was one of a handful of publishers starting to treat Internet-related terms as common nouns, not capitalized proper nouns. At the time, I wrote: “I suspect that the editors of Wired News are a few years ahead of their time, if not a few decades.”

I shoulda left off that last clause. It’s a couple years later, and I’m seeing more and more influential outlets beginning to lowercase the word web, for instance. This should be a source of never-ending fun for me over the next few months, as I work on a pair of new books: one for Microsoft Press, which capitalizes the Web, and Que, which doesn’t.

Me, I’m going to start using the lower-case when talking about the web. I’m not ready to make Internet generic, though.