The +1 convention of voting up a post, recently made popular by Google both in Google Plus and within search results, may seem new and shiny but turns out to be at least 15 years old.

I mentioned today on Twitter that I thought the use of the expression “+1″ was becoming the new universal “Like” or “I ♥”. My friend vruz responded that it originated with the Apache Foundation, and sent me a link to a 1995 document describing Apache voting rules & guidelines which includes the following:

+1 Yes, agree, or the action should be performed. On some issues, this vote must only be given after the voter has tested the action on their own system(s).

It’s all in how you package it. And I stand behind my original observation that the use of +1 as an expression meaning “I like this” or “I approve” has only recently become widespread among non-geeks, but obviously +1ing has been going on for a long time.

Tags: plus one, 1, Google Plus, Apache

For a programmer, an “elegant” solution is one that uses the least code possible to handle a particular function or process. Last month I wrote about the importance of every single word you choose. This week I spotted on the side of an Oroweat bread truck one of the most elegant taglines I’ve ever seen:

Bread Perfected. It says in two words what the company does, how well they do it, and that they’ve got it all figured out. They’re not trying to perfect bread. They’ve done it. And they could have instead had a tagline like “Serving Our Customers with Commercial and Residential Baking Solutions.” But how appetizing is that? This is an amazing display of corporate restraint.

Oroweat’s tagline serves as a reminder that less is more, that often, just a handful of words can tell the story just as well as 500. Are you deleting unnecessary words from your writing? Are you a champion of brevity and clarity? Have you seen any elegant prose recently?

Tags: advertising, marketing, writing, copywriting, taglines