Computas, society ‘n natur, dogg

Gizoogle is a cross between Google and a dictionary of African American Hip Hop Vernacular. It’s a search engine that translates its results into “gansta-speak” a la Snoop Dogg. The results are entertaining (to me anyway) and the site has received quite a bit of coverage. Here is some coverage from the Washington Post. The site is another example of the how the net shifts our definitions of content, intellectual property, and context. Here is free tool that allows you to take any webapage and make it completely different, in a way some people might be offensive.

Try translating our blog. The caption under the second to last cat photo is particularly funny.

3 Responses to “Computas, society ‘n natur, dogg”

  1. sieber says:

    Oh, that slays. I translated http://www.whitehouse.gov and this is what it gave me for the Saturday radio address on Social Security:

    In his weekly radio address, President Bush said, “The American thugz did not place us in office ta pass on problems ta future generizzles n future Presidents n future Congresses. I wizzay wizzle wit B-to-tha-izzoth parties ta fix Social Security permanently fo shizzle. Social Security has been there fo` generizzles of Americans, n drug deala we will strengthen it fo` generizzles ta come.”

  2. Hannah says:

    :0 offensive (and funny). I guess if you knew the programming language PHP you can make
    up your own language too?! Has anyone in our class tried it? There are issues surrounding
    ICT and the degradation of our language…what will be the effects on our society over time?

  3. Liam says:

    Well, our language is always evolving, I’d be more worried about the internet not allowing our language to evolve, with everyone reading and listening to the same dialect, we might lose some of the linguistic diversity. Of course, leetspeak might be evidence that people will continue to develop dialects even across geographic boundries.

    It’s fun to imagine people learning english rules with leetspeak and wordizzles mixed in.

    Of course, I have to mention the Google bork language settings, they’re still my favorite (you can get to them if you click on the preferences link from the Google main page and choose Bork, bork, bork)