Thursday, November 15, 2007

Speeding Communications with Abbreviations

Most folks talk faster than they can type, so text chat in one-to-one IM, Group IM Chat, and at meetings can seem slow by comparison. One good way of speeding text chat up is by using abbreviations and acronyms – short hand ways to say something that would otherwise take significantly longer to type in, which can improve speed and accuracy. Such use is socially determined by the setting in which it occurs, and this usage can be off-putting to people who are new to that setting. So to help bring these benefits to communication between comrades and at our Party meetings, I've assembled a quick list of the commonly used abbreviations and acronyms we're most likely to use, drawn from the chat transcripts of our first two OGGMs – hope you find it useful.

AFAIK    As Far As I Know
AFAIR As Far As I Recall
AFK Away From Keyboard
AR Abuse Report, or the SL Abuse Reporting and
arbitrary 'justice' system
ATM At The Moment
BRB Be Right Back
BTW By The Way
CPSL Communist Party of Second Life
CPSL HQ Communist Party of Second Life Headquarters:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vigdorova/37/204/74
FYI For Yor Information
GN Group Notice
HUD Head Up Device – in Second Life usage, usually a gadget
that you attach to one of your Viewer's eight HUD points
IM Instant Message, the chat channels used to talk to
individuals and Groups
IMHO In My Humble Opinion
IMO In My Opinion
IRL In Real Life
ISL In Second Life
LOL Laugh Out Loud
OGMM Open General Membership Meeting – in CPSL usage; currently
every Sunday at 11:00am PST (=19:00 GMT) at CPSL HQ
RL Real Life
SL Second Life
SLURL Second Life Uniform Resource Locator, providing direct
teleport links to locations in Second Life
More info: http://slurl.com
TY Thank You
WB Welcome Back
Note: although the left hand column shows CAPITALS, in chat the lower case is sometimes used to further speed up text chat.

In Membership Meetings
Comrade's initials, eg AA = Alys Abruzzo, are much quicker and easier to type than typing their first name in full.

Time References
GMT      Greenwich Mean Time
PDT Pacific Daylight Time
PST Pacific Standard Time (Note that during summer daylight saving
time/summer time is observed, and PDT is used instead)
SLT Second Life Time, ie: PST in winter, PDT in summer (in the
Northern hemisphere, & vise versa in the Southern hemisphere)
http://www.timeanddate.com
...is he best website I've found for keeping track of world time, from taking account of daylight saving times, via setting up a 'Personal World Clock', to finding out when a future event will occur in your time-zone with the 'Fixed Time World Clock', and many other time related tasks.

Please add a comment below with your suggestion(s) for additions, and I'll add them to the list above.

In Solidarity,

Dalinian Bing

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