If you're not a word nerd, you'll want to skip this post. But for those who pay attention to such matters, a few notes on style. Previous regimes at Valleywag have vociferously rejected CamelCase in company names, but I've reinstated it. While I cringe when I see people incorrectly capitalize the "W" in "Valleywag," I find it equally noisome when people write "Myspace" for "MySpace" or "Linked In" for "LinkedIn." With all due respect to my predecessors, I don't think it makes one look hip; I think, rather, that it makes you look clueless and lazy. Likewise, I'm breaking with the vile Luddite practice of lowercasing "Internet" and "Web," and insisting on their capitalization. Why?

Because they're proper nouns. An "internet" is any interconnected network of networks; a "web," lowercased, is any connection of hyperlinked pages. The Internet, and the World Wide Web — the ones we all connect to — are the only ones we actually care about. If you insist on writing about "the internet," I'll insist on asking, "Which one?"