I smuggled a neologism… or did I?

Back in October 2005, few weeks after I moved to the US, I wrote a blog post in which I introduced the idea of a collective name for the federated resources accessible to a company. One of the names I proposed was federnet. At the time I made a quick search on the Internet to see if anybody was already using the term for something of the sort, but nobody appeared to.

Well, I actually used the term in the book; I don’t know how I managed to get it past the severe reviewers of AW, but I did! 🙂 Now: since it appears on a publication, with its nice ISBN & classification according to the Library of Congress, I am tempted to say that it made a further step in the long road toward inclusion. We are still far from Merriam Webster or even just wikipedia, of course, but hey… you never know 😉

Before writing this post I made a short search on the term, just to see if it enjoyed any uptake, and I was pretty surprised to find an article on the CIO Magazine website that mentions the term federnet! The article, with a date almost a year after my blog post (the website says September the 13th, 2006), takes the consumer angle and a way more centralized approach, but its results are not too different from mine after all (use of standards, benefits of federation). It even mentions intranet and Internet vs federnet (though they are mentioned for assonance reasons, rather than conceptual kinship).  I am sure that at the time a query for “federnet” on any search engine would have brought up my post if not as the very first result, very high in the list… hence I am mildly surprised that the article didn’t make any mention of my post. In any case: if that article ever appeared in print, then they bet me in smuggling the neologism in the nest stage toward the status of proper word 🙂