The animated GIF is the Internet’s native art form. But 25 years later, we still haven’t decided how to pronounce it.

We’ve spilled so many words over the pronunciation of a single letter, rivaled only by the debate over tabs vs. spaces, email vs. e-mail, and whether to capitalize “Internet.”

So, how do you pronounce GIF?

There are three main camps:

1. Soft G—GIF is like “jif.” You think an inventor should be able to dictate how their invention is pronounced.
2. Hard G—GIF is like “gift.” You believe that the creator’s wishes are largely irrelevant because language evolves, and prescriptive approaches to language are pointless.
3. ↓

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For the “soft G” crowd, this issue was settled in 1987 when CompuServe engineer Steve Wilhite first designed the GIF format. He’s always been adamant about the pronunciation, as in this interview with the New York Times last year:

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

There’s something to this argument.

One of the great things about inventing something is that you get to name it, and by extension, how it’s pronounced. Honoring an inventor’s wishes may not be required, but it’s the nice thing to do.

There’s only one problem: Steve Wilhite and CompuServe did not invent the animated GIF as we know it.

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The creators of the GIF format didn’t anticipate this kind of usage for their format, and the proof is in the spec itself — they never specified a way to loop animations.

When CompuServe added animation to the GIF89a spec in 1989, animations would only play once. For six years, every animated GIF ended on the final frame.

It was Netscape, not CompuServe, that added the ability to repeat animations, starting with Navigator 2.0 beta 4 in December 1995. Netscape defined an extension to the GIF format that specified how many times an animation should loop or if it should play infinitely.

Today, every animated GIF contains the “NETSCAPE2.0” string inside it, a digital thumbprint that firmly places the modern animated GIF as a Web-era invention.

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So, does this mean that Netscape should get to dictate how it’s pronounced? No, not really.

Because when we talk about GIFs these days, we’re not really talking about the file format. We’re talking about the art form and culture that surrounds it, and that was created and popularized by the Internet.

The modern GIF was invented by the Internet, and like the Internet, its applications sprawl beyond comprehension. Early memes, reaction GIFs, glitch animations, wigglegrams, Blingee, cinemagraphs, and countless variations spread on Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and dedicated net art communities like dump.fm.

GIF isn’t just a file format, it’s an art form and a culture. And, despite Wilhite’s efforts, most of the people in that culture pronounce it with a “hard G.”

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Since I downloaded my first GIF off a BBS in the late 1980s, I’ve pronounced GIF with a hard “g” like “gift.” It looked natural to me, and like many others, it was an on-screen acronym that I didn’t hear out loud until years later. I stuck with that pronunciation for years, even after I knew the “official” pronunciation.

But I’m not entirely comfortable disregarding the wishes of Steve Wilhite or the culture of animated GIF art, so I started taking a new approach last year:

“JIF” is the format. “GIF” is the culture.

To honor Wilhite’s pioneering work, I pronounce every static or non-looping GIF with a soft-G. Every discussion of the file format, transparency, interlacing, and static GIFs are “jifs.” These are all “jifs.” So are these.

But the animated GIF, as we know it, was created by Netscape and popularized by the Internet, so I pronounce it with a hard-G.

There! That oughta settle it, once and for all.

Note: I originally published this post on Medium, as part of The Message, on April 29, 2014.

This month, I joined The Message, a new collaborative writing experiment on Medium with an all-star list of some of my favorite writers—danah boyd, Anil Dash, Craig Mod, Rex Sorgatz, Paul Ford, Joanne McNeil, Virginia Heffernan, Clive Thompson, Quinn Norton, Robin Sloan, and Zeynep Tufekci.

Medium’s Kate Lee wrote an introductory post introducing The Message and how we came up with its name. It’s a playful nod to McLuhan, but an appropriate one.

The Message may sound like a simple group blog, but I’m using it as an opportunity to play with Medium as a new medium for writing, pushing its publishing and communication tools to try new things that I can’t really do here on Waxy. I’ll still republish most of my posts here for permanent archiving, but inevitably, they’ll lose something in the translation.

Before publishing anything on The Message, I wanted to know what Medium was capable of, so I published this.

It broke Medium, turning their recommendation emails and user interface into glitch art, crashing computers, and stressing out the support staff.

I followed it up by glitching LinkedIn. That was fun.

This morning, I published my first official post on The Message, my take on the GIF pronunciation war. Short version: CompuServe didn’t actually invent the animated GIF, as we know it, so doesn’t get to dictate how it’s pronounced. It’s a product of the web era, invented by Netscape and popularized by an entire culture.

I hope you like it.

Last February, I was honored to be invited to speak at Webstock in New Zealand, along with Maciej Ceglowski, Erika Hall, Charlie Todd, Clive Thompson, and a bunch of other neat people.

My talk, like New Zealand itself, was a bit of a whirlwind. I roused the hungover crowd on Friday morning with a look back at my childhood on the Sunset Strip and how it shaped my later views on creative and financial independence. The talk’s now online, and you can watch it here. I’m pretty happy with how it came out, hope you like it.

Five years ago, I wrote about how I transcribe audio with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, splitting interviews into small segments and distributing the work among dozens of anonymous people. It ended up as one of my most popular posts ever, continuing to draw traffic and comments every day.

Lately, I’ve been toying with a free, fast way to generate machine transcriptions: repurposing YouTube’s automatic captions feature.

How It Works

Every time you upload a video, YouTube tries to generate a caption file. If there’s audible text, you can grab a subtitle file within a few minutes of uploading the video.

But how’s the quality? Pretty mediocre! It’s about as good as you’d expect from a free machine-generated transcript. The caption files have no punctuation between sentences, speakers aren’t broken out separately, and errors are very common.

But if you’re transcribing interviews, it’s often easier to edit a flawed transcript than starting from scratch. And YouTube provides a solid interface for editing your transcript audio and getting the results in plaintext.

I used TunesToTube, a free service for uploading MP3s to YouTube, to upload the first 15 minutes of our New Disruptors interview, with permission from Glenn Fleishman.

It took about 30 seconds for TunesToTube to generate the 15-minute-long video, three seconds to upload it, and about a minute for the video to be viewable on my account.

It takes a bit more time for YouTube to generate the audio transcriptions. Testing in the middle of a weekday, it took about six minutes to transcribe a two-minute video, and around 30 minutes for the 15-minute video. Fortunately, there’s nothing you need to do while it processes. Just upload and wait.

I ran a number of familiar film monologues through the YouTube’s transcription engine, and the results vary from solid to laughably bad. I’ve posted the videos below with the automatic transcription and their actual text.

As you’d expect, it works best with clear enunciation and spoken word. Soft words over background music, like in the Breakfast Club clip, falls apart pretty quick. But some, like Independence Day, aren’t terrible.

Continue reading “Dirty, Fast, and Free Audio Transcription with YouTube” →

It’s Oscar piracy season, that time of the year where screeners of newly-released critical darlings are leaked online as DVD and Blu-Ray screeners are sent out around the world to Academy voters and secretly loaned to their friends and relatives.

Yesterday was a busy day with screener copies of Frozen, Her, and The Wolf of Wall Street all appearing online.

Today, I got a tip that there was a very unusual watermark in the screener of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty that leaked online today. I dug it up, and sure enough, a very familiar name pops up in the first scene of the screener. I made a GIF of it:

Oh, Ellen! If the watermark’s accurate, this screener belonged to Ellen DeGeneres. But was it actually an Oscar screener? Probably not.

The watermark shows that the screener was created on November 26, 2013. According to Ken Rudolph’s Academy screener list, he received the Walter Mitty DVD screener via UPS on December 19.

That’s a pretty huge gap, indicating that Ellen’s screener wasn’t for Oscar consideration, but instead given to her for review in advance of Ben Stiller’s December 4 appearance on her show.

Of course, there’s a chance, albeit small, that this watermark was added by someone besides 20th Century Fox — by someone trying to hide the identity of the actual source, maybe.

More likely, the watermark is accurate and Ellen’s screener simply ended up in the wrong hands. A postal worker, one of her employees, friend, family member, or countless others in the production and distribution chain could be responsible for ripping the DVD and putting it online.

It’s very common for screeners to leak, but rare for a celebrity’s name to be identified as the source. In 2011, a screener copy of Super 8 leaked online with Howard Stern’s name clearly watermarked on it. Stern vehemently denied leaking the film on air.

Curious to see if Ellen responds the same way.

As usual, I’ll update my spreadsheet of Oscar screener piracy statistics as soon as the nominees are announced on the morning of January 16.