I salute Scott Fahlman

Who's Scott Fahlman? You may not recognize his name, but anyone who is the least bit Internet savvy knows his symbol is more popular than the one Prince tried on several years ago.

Still don't know who he is? Let me give you a hint:

:)

Fahlman is the guy who suggested combining the colon with a closing parenthesis to create the smiley emoticon popularly used by all us Web geeks today. LOL takes a back seat to :), an easy ending to a statement to show the mood of the author.

Smiley's brother ;) is also popular, but it's Smiley himself who marks a landmark anniversary this week.

After all, the phenomenon is about to turn 25--a dinosaur
in Web years. The origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott
Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of
Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in
the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or
non-serious topic.
"Nobody ever guessed that this would catch on. I certainly
didn't," said Fahlman, who is still on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. But as he
recounted, the trend spread, initially to other Internet-pioneering universities
like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then
beyond.
"As the Internet grew, it escaped this little closed community of
computer scientists and made it into first other universities, a much larger
group, and then out into the general public," Fahlman said. "It's been
interesting to see (smiley faces) trickle from place to place, and now it's
showing up in postings from Russia and China and all over the world. It's been
fun to watch that."
Essentially, the emoticon proliferated along with the
Internet itself.
"For people who first get into it, it's like they know the
password to the secret club," Fahlman said. But now that emoticons have spread
into every niche of Net culture and morphed into myriad (arguably irritating)
spinoffs, that sense of exclusivity has lost some of its luster. "It's kind of
pathetic when the 'in group' is sort of half the world," Fahlman observed. "But
originally, people were using these because it was some cool thing and it showed
that you were a real expert user of the Internet, that you knew the secret
language."

The Web smiley's motto: Grin and bear it CNET:

To Scott Fahlman, I salute you -- and I resist using those dopey cartoonish icons.

:)