I scrobble, you scrobble, we scrobble.
As you all know by now, the audioscrobbler is a music player plugin from Last.FM that keeps track of what you play. When you play a track, the scrobbler scrobbles the play data back to last.fm where it is added to their massive taste database. The word 'scrobble' really is a great word. It is fun to say, and in some odd way seems to be descriptive of my taste data being stuffed into a database. I've wondered if the word was a made up concoction of RJ (the guy at Last.FM who wrote the first scrobbler) or if the word was an English-ism that every UK resident uses every day ("Children, help me scrobble the blood pudding into the wardrobe"). I asked RJ about this - he says that he has always thought that the word was a made up word without any previous meaning.
Funny thing is, I encountered the word in the wild and not in the context of Music 2.0. I was reading the book called "Neverwhere"
by Neil Gaiman. In this book there is a passage of dialog between
two characters (Vandemar and Coup) where
they talked about 'scrobbling' a girl (which likely meant that
they
would do something nasty to her). This book was published before the
birth of the Audioscrobbler, so I asked RJ about it. He said he never
read it. I also asked Neil Gaiman where he got the word
from, but he has yet to reply. And so in the end we have a new
word to add to the dictionary with perhaps at least two
meanings. (I'm scrobbling some weezer right now).