Netrepreneurs are looking for stickiness.

The recent NPA conference on the electronic revolution (see p. 1) cast the spotlight on the changing face of the English language, as bandied about by netrepreneurs.

Andrew Jacobson's keynote speech title, "Clicks and Mortar," was also the title of a Dec. 9th New Yorker article, which describes the rise of online shopping The author claims its success is based as much on a revolution in offline warehousing (mortar) as in electronic ordering (clicks).

Editors who have only recently become comfortable being called content providers now find themselves referred to as providing stickiness. E-mail and web copy are proliferating so rapidly and widely that it's difficult to get "viewers" to slow down and read the stuff. That is, unless it has stickiness--concise, solid information or analysis of benefit to the reader--the core quality of newsletters

Even some traditional terms are taking on a new look:

* Business-to-business, commonly abbreviated b-to-b, is now B2B.

* Consumer publications now have the moniker B2C.

* Old-fashioned face-to-face communications have the new techno-edge rendering of F2E 

We've yet to see a favorable review of Microsoft's Encarta World English Dictionary--subtitled "The New Global Authority"--but it should at least allow us to navigate some of the new internet terms.

There's also, of course, that new entity that virtually every publisher is striving to become: a dotcom--a company having presence on the internet.

Towards the end of the information-overloaded conference, I got into the word-minting spirit myself, realizing that I was experiencing net lag.