Over at TechFlash, you can read my guest commentary about the event, “The Sense of a Gnomedex.”

I also had the challenge of improvising a five-minute presentation at Gnomedex — on less than 15 minutes notice. You can see the result of my addressing the audience-generated issue, “Why is my digital privacy a marketable commodity,” in glorious web video here.

What do I mean by lazy? Words and phrases that sound as though they’re saying something but are content placebos. Technology (and education technology) marketers are notorious for this practice. While many lazy words probably once had specific meaning, they’re now applied so indiscriminately they’ve become like over- and mis- used cooking ingredients: too many empty word calories, filling space instead of stomachs, and similarly providing no sustained energy.

My 2010 list of the top five linguistic sugar bombs that should carry warning labels:

“Leading.” The mainstay of public relations boilerplate, corporate descriptions and positioning statements, this word says nothing. I’ve been campaigning for the retirement of this hoary chestnut for a dozen years. “Leading” is a shortcut used when someone can’t articulate why a product, service or company is different — or doesn’t want to go through the work required to get to that point of differentiation.

“Leading” (frequently applied as “leading company,” “leading provider,” or, perhaps someday, “leading leader”) is the ultimate placeholder marketing word, the equivalent of “um” or “er” in conversation. It sounds as if you’re saying something when, in reality, you just don’t want the other person to stop listening.

Real words that work better and demonstrate difference are defensible superlatives such as “only,” “largest,” “fastest,” “most respected” (any of the previous perhaps proven through research and surveys) and the like. They represent a unique position that the competition can’t claim. “Leading” doesn’t, nor does its lesser sibling “premier” or “best.” “Leading” alone usually implies a company, well, isn’t.

“21st century.” We’re entering its second decade. If you’re using this now, you’re hopelessly behind. Or writing a memoir set in 1995.

“Digital natives.” The relatively inexpensive, mass-produced personal computer (the Apple II) was introduced in 1977, the IBM PC in 1981, the Web browser in 1993. That last is nearly twenty years ago. Your “digital native” is not a six-year-old entering an elementary school. It’s the 25-year-old teaching them. Using this phrase simply shows you’re not one.

“User-friendly.” I’d really hoped this had faded away at the turn of the century. After all, it has as its genesis early personal computer software programs for which design improved to appeal to the novice normal, not the expert techie. Yet it persists. Before you use it, please ask yourself the last time you saw a website, service, or product call itself “user-hostile.” And resist.

“Anytime, anywhere.” Used (sometimes with “access” appended) as a self-consciously clever synonym for “it’s all on the Web/in the cloud/not stuck on your premises, stupid.” Aside from being increasingly trite, this phrase falls into the false-benefit trap of describing what a feature does when it should be saying what that feature means to the customer, with concrete examples to enthuse the target audience. If the service has to do with travel, can I use it at the airport on my mobile phone? If it’s a classroom study aid, can I practice on a laptop in the park on a weekend? If so, say so.

There are others (my 2006 list, focused mainly on education technology, had now-fading favorites “data-driven decision making” and “multiple measures of progress;” 2004’s more consumer-centric list featured the still-undead phrases “because you deserve it” and “powered by”). There will always be new entrants, because frequently it’s easier to parrot an accepted trendy term that can mean anything than to get something specific and truly meaningful through multiple levels of internal company review.

But if you want to get people motivated to take action, kill the empty calorie, zombie words. Marketers should do the hard work of clearly stating why customers should be excited, so customers feel they haven’t wasted their time if they pay in the hard currency of attention.

The guest commentary: “Perfect, perfectly useless tech.”

Why would I do something others in my former profession might think, well, is stupid?

After all, I spent more than a decade as a full-time news broadcaster (radio and TV), and then — after I moved to marketing consulting — still worked on the side as a columnist for Eastsideweek/Seattle Weekly (for four years) and KCPQ-TV Seattle as a commentator (for another four years). I should be one of the last people to call for journalist “certification.”

Years ago, when I read Algis Budrys’ 1977 novel Michaelmas, I wasn’t just struck by its prescient vision of a distributed, networked computer intelligence. I was struck by its vision of the profession of its protagonist: as a highly respected, freelance journalist, handling his own research, video and reporting — and selling his reporting services to the highest bidder.

More than 30 years later, Budrys (who died last year) may have hit upon the journalistic future I think we’re about to embark upon: that of free-agent professionals who are medium agnostic and can produce text, audio and video for just about any kind of media outlet, including one they individually control.  Think of it as blended reporting.

A baby step in that direction is independent certification of journalists as professionals (not government licensing, and not required — it’s all optional). As I noted in the lively comments to the TechFlash piece, certification would provide another tool to help news consumers comparison shop among unfamiliar news sources. And perhaps provide some guidance for the wannabe journalist (the ones without formal training or experience) that they’re on the right track.

It certainly won’t guarantee good reporting. If what someone produces is inaccurate or crap, the audience won’t come back. Certification is only a initial filter that certain standards and expected practices are likely to be adhered to.

Why hasn’t this been done before? I think the reason practicing journalists are queasy about certification is three-fold:

1) First Amendment fears. Some would see certification, even voluntary, as a first step toward government licensing (which I oppose). This is why, I think, RTNDA and SPJ/SDX — even with their standards and codes of ethics — have never taken the step beyond membership to certification, unlike associations in other many other professions.

2) Notoriously independent nature. Journalists are an ornery bunch (me included).

3) Assumed screening by the employing organization. Journalist wannabes didn’t used to have a news media voice or be able to reach an audience unless they were hired by a journalistic organization that effectively vouched for them.

It’s the last that is disappearing with the democratization of news distribution, and what leads me to think it’s time to reconsider optional, voluntary certification.

Even though fellow professional and thoughtful-person-in-general Linda Thomas (@TheNewsChick on Twitter) indicated in the TechFlash comments she doesn’t like the idea, she did earlier suggest it may lead to a future in which late night TV is filled with flashing 1-800-BE-A-JOURNO ads.

I think all sides can agree that, truly, would be a news dystopia.

For more than 15 years, brick-and-mortar businesses have been creating Internet presences for both marketing and e-commerce. But there seems to have been an unspoken hesitancy to promote moves in the other direction, from Web-only to Web-plus-cinder block.

Underlying the hesitancy may be a false assumption that the Internet is the ultimate destination for all business, and that a physical presence is a sign of the past. No company, it’s implied, should go out of its way to create a real-world presence if the business was spawned and is doing fine on the Web.

Yet it does pay off. In the TechFlash commentary, I point out one of the highest-profile success stories is women’s active wear retailer Lucy. Now Smilebox is the latest to make the move. While Smilebox is not a traditional “retailer,” that in itself is an increasingly dated label as more companies sell directly to consumers, and as more retailers create their own merchandise (think Lands’ End). Smilebox effectively is a retailer.

The reality is technology moves faster than biology, or even psychology. We live in the analog world, even if we spend a lot of our work and leisure time in the digital one. Good marketing requires understanding that blend of being wherever the customer is. Not where we wish he or she would be.

That doesn’t mean every Web-only business should have a physical presence. It depends on the customer set, the potential cost versus revenue, and a host of other factors. But it shouldn’t automatically be dismissed, either, out of some kind of only-the-Web-is-the-future bias. Whether virtual or physical, marketers should be reality-agnostic.

Admittedly, I’m a focus group of one. But I also am predisposed to like newspapers (as a former alternative weekly newspaper columnist), which apparently puts me in the minority. Yet, despite my high newsprint-stupidity threshold, these customer prevention policies stun even me:

Trial Subscription from Hell. After years of reading USA Today as a road warrior, I decided it would be nice to get it at home. I signed up online for an eight-week trial subscription at a special rate. Within three days, my credit card was charged twice at two different rates. After several emails and phone calls during which USA Today couldn’t find the extra charge (though both appeared on my credit card online statement), I disputed the second charge with my card issuer and cancelled the first subscription. I thought that was it.

A month later, what should appear in my inbox but an email from USA Today, “welcoming” me as a new subscriber. Apparently the second subscription charge had finally made it through their system and generated a new trial subscription. I called, cancelled again … and a week later received a letter congratulating me for enrolling in the automated EZ-PAY subscription renewal program. The next day, an email and phone call from USA Today asked me to renew what I’d cancelled.

This time I also wrote a letter, leading to a call from an “executive customer service” rep who, rather than trying to fix the problem, basically accused me of making it all up. When in doubt, blame the customer. I swore I’d never do business again with a company that couldn’t keep track of customer payments.

Delivery by Godot. Next, I figured, why not try the New York Times? Because of my frequent travel, I wanted to start with Sunday only. I subscribed, got a prompt confirmation, and the payment was correct. So far, so good. I waited for the first delivery. And waited. No paper the first Sunday; I called to report it. Little did I know that, over the next four months, my usual Sunday routine would be: walk Golden Retriever, check paper tube, curse delivery person, visit NY Times Web site, report missed delivery. This occurred roughly every other Sunday and, at the very end, in three out of four.

The sad part was the disappointed Golden with nothing to carry back to the house.

Newspaper Roulette. During one of the many gaps either before or during the New York Times delivery, I decided to re-subscribe to the Wall Street Journal to ensure something would show up. And, well, something did. But not always the Wall Street Journal. Turns out the Journal (like many national newspapers, such as the New York Times) contracts with carriers of local papers for delivery. But not every carrier reads the delivery labels carefully.

Often we’d receive, instead of the Journal, a copy of Investors Business Daily or the Tacoma News-Tribune. We also have a large collection of Journal delivery labels with other people’s names and account numbers, so we know the neighbors with whom we share a common dead-tree media experience. Of course, the down side is that someone else’s subscription probably stops when we ask for a vacation hold. At least no one has to deliver the online version to us.

Yes, these are anedotal stories. And they are for national, not local, newspapers. But every time I hear that Craigslist and Google News are killing newspapers, I think about crappy customer service and incompetent carrier delivery that awaits the ever-fewer, aging subscribers. Bad customer service isn’t an external company-killer. It’s a self-inflicted wound.

And that’s a marketing lesson any struggling business should learn.

In a guest commentary on TechFlash.com, I’ve outlined my thoughts. And I’ll stress test them when I moderate a panel of game industry execs at the Washington Technology Industry Association dinner Wednesday in Seattle.

It’s hard not to want to agree with people like Big Fish CEO Jeremy Lewis, who compared the appeal of his company’s casual games to Charlie Chaplin’s films during the Great Depression. Chaplin’s escapist entertainment was cheap; the medium, novel. The same is true of many games today.  And they’re far better than video games available during the last deep recession of 1981-82. Yet that recession ended with the 1983 collapse of the era’s video game industry. Not necessarily a great historic precedent.

So makers of confident pronouncements should be wary. Any recession proofing could be relative depending on how far the economic tide recedes — and which players are left stranded on the bottom.

In the interests of protecting the clueless (or perhaps in this economy, resourceless), I won’t name the companies. Or even the competition. But if you’d like to waste your award entry money, you do so can very efficiently by following these three easy steps:

1) Don’t correctly list the product name in the entry. In a world with the Web, you have to assume that the judges are going to go to your company’s Web site to get some background information on your entry. Especially in a competition for products that were supposed to be available in the previous calendar year. Yet several entries I judged were listed with a product name that clearly matched no single product on the entering company’s Web sites.

In one case, when I did find the name used, it was as a headline in a product description. I figured that was the right product. But I was corrected by the company itself and told that wasn’t what they entered — their own Web page was in error. In a second case, I had a trifecta: a company exec, the company’s Web site, and the company’s award entry all disagreed on what products made up a “suite” that had been entered. Any customer wanting to buy that suite, should it make the final award ballot, is likely guaranteed a sour experience. No company should force a judge to figure out what the entrant meant to enter.

2) Don’t offer a complete customer experience. If your product has both an authoring/creating mode and a user mode and you do a guided demo (due to a product’s complex nature), don’t just show one mode. For the product to be judged properly, you should show how something is created, and then how it’s used. This seems like a no brainer.

Yet three times I saw only saw part of a product because, I suppose, the company thought it was the most impressive. That would have been fine, if they’d just entered part of a product. It’s like being asked to issue a full report on the moon but only being shown the side that always faces the Earth.

3) Make your judging material confusing. One company, a major, well-known software developer, kindly provided me with a log-in to their Web-based product and a reviewer’s guide — a reviewer’s guide in which the thoughtful, detailed steps didn’t match what was actually possible once I logged in. As a matter of fact, all of the demonstration content in the reviewer’s guide was nowhere to be found in the Web-based product; I had to approximate it. All that was missing after I logged in was a splash screen reading, “Imagine if you will….”

In all of the above cases I was able to figure out, to the best of my ability, what had actually been entered, how it might work if I had access to the full product, and what steps to take to see all the key features. Barely. But if winning awards has marketing value — and that is, presumably, the major reason companies enter these competitions — dropping the ball when judging begins is akin to dropping the entry cash into a very deep fixture with blue water at the bottom.

If you’re a marketing or other company exec wondering why your firm never wins any award competitions it enters, I suggest first looking at what you provide the volunteer judges after you fill out the entry form and cut the check.

Sure, you can’t win if you don’t enter. But you also can’t win if don’t pay attention to what you do after you enter, either.

But inside the education industry, even among the largest players, there are debates about whether or when to blog. Pros and cons were dutifully outlined for an article I wrote for the Software and Information Industry Association’s new book, The Expert’s Guide to the K-12 School Market, Second Edition. You can find an excerpt that succinctly outlines the pros and cons of companies blogging on the Selling to Schools site.

The full article in the book also includes a nine-step checklist to follow before starting a company or product blog. And, as you’ll note, the pros and cons and checklist apply to any business — not just those in the education market.

So why is this article curious? Because it, like almost nothing else, illustrates the gap between the leading edge and the trailing edge of technology.

Technologists today would be stunned that anyone would even think to ask about whether a company should blog; after all, blogging is a decade old. Not only is everyone blogging now, they’d say in wide-eyed disbelief, but anyone who knows anything has moved on to Twitter or something less, well, ancient.

Yet educators and education companies — a combination of a system developed for a mostly agrarian America and an industry still largely more comfortable with paper than pixels — are just starting, in broad measures, to come to terms with technology tools used in their classrooms and industry.

That’s not to say either extreme of the adoption curve is right or wrong. It sometimes helps to wait a reasonable interval so the pros and cons of any new development are clear, as my article outlines for blogging.

But, in my mind, there is also no better example of the disconnect between those who develop cool new stuff, and those who have to figure out how to use it in a practical manner in existing settings.

As someone who loves words and language (and indeed is a writer when he’s not a marketer), I’m amazed at how some marketers abuse their biggest tool for communication. Now that 2003 is becoming a memory, there are words and phrases that should be banished from marketers’ and PR practitioners’ lexicons. Not just in technology marketing, but in all marketing.

Why? Because they’re overused, meaningless or lazy. Indeed, I suspect when most prospects or customers see these words and phrases, they reflexively treat them as one treats long names in a classic Russian novel: their brains glaze over and they skip to the next word or phrase.

Allow me to suggest five words or phrases for banishment:

1) “Leading” This standard of PR boilerplate (as in “leading company”) should have been killed off years ago. It’s lazy. It shows a company can’t figure out why its product, service or self is different from anyone else, or — worse yet — confirms that it really isn’t any different. “Leading” should only be used for athletic events or questions.

2) “Because you deserve it” This pops up in broadcast and print advertising ad nauseum. Admit it: What most people who think they “deserve” something really deserve is a good smack upside the head. We have a culture of entitlement and this is going to change it? Encourage a bit of personal responsibility. Seriously, this phrase is the most blatant kind of ego manipulation that anyone with half a brain sees as such.

3) “Collectible” This label tends to be slapped on product packaging for a higher-priced version or one of a series. If any toy, DVD or issue of TV Guide bears this label, you can be certain they’ve created enough copies of it to ensure it never will be.

4) “Powered by [blank]” or “[Blank] inside” This favorite of technology and Web site companies worked once: for Intel. And Intel spent millions in advertising to reinforce that message. Still, people buy Dell or IBM laptops, not Intel laptops, and the chip inside is a tertiary choice to manufacturer brand and price. Customers generally don’t care what powers something as long as that something works. And it can backfire. (“Powered by Google? Why, wasn’t their own old search engine any good? Wonder what’s not up to par about the rest of the site?”) Sure, a brand name like Intel or Google can give a boost to an otherwise unknown. But if the unknown turns out to be any good, that’s the brand the unknown’s marketer should be trumpeting. We live in an overmarketed world: Expect prospects to remember one brand message, not two.

5) “… And more” This catch-all usually appears in small business names, company tag lines or advertising copy. I suspect it results from weary marketers giving in after endless internal arguments: “But we sell more than widgets.” “OK, OK, we’ll call it ‘Widgets and More.’” Look, you’ve carefully identified your target audience, identified what your competition is known for and decided what makes you unique. Why water it down by tagging on “and more” to your name or description? Let people know you for what you want to be known, and be pleasantly surprised that you offer a broader range. But let your marketing message emphasize your core.

Sure, there are others (“mission critical,” for example, itself should be on the critical list, as should “interactive,” “cyber” and “e-” anything, all of which have that dot-com stench of death about them), but the above five would be a great start. Language is a marketer’s tool and, like any tool, it can be used well … or in these cases, quite badly.