The original BuzzPhraser was created by the staff in the office of my old company in 1990 or so. It took the form of a spreadsheet that we gradually filled with overused buzzwords. To qualify, they had to work in a phrase the way a blank tile works in Scrabble: you can use it anywhere, but it has no value.
We sorted these words in to a series of columns: adverbs, adjectives, adnouns (nouns used as adjectives), nouns, prefixes and suffixes. After the columns began to overflow, I thought "Hmm... BS seems to be programmable. Let's make something here. So I got together with Ray Miller of Turtlelips Productions and we (mostly Ray) crafted a Hypercard stack that put together random buzzphrases from the table, based on various user-defined combinations of modifiers, nouns, prefixes and suffixes. BuzzPhraser made a bit of news and then quickly became one of the most-downloaded files on both AOL and Compuserve.
Several years ago, Charles Roth (the prime author of Caucus, the primo conferencing software) kindly adapted BuzzPhraser to the Web, where it has served ever since, burping up useful but value-free generica for publicists and their enemies everywhere. Examples:
Now Charles has completely re-written the whole site in Javascript and open-sourced it. To get the source, go to <http://www.buzzphraser.com/buzz.tar>. And let us know what you do with it.
— Doc Searls <[email protected]>