I used to call this the “new media around” but nowadays I prefer the label “nu-business around”, coined by Max Duley:

“They’re calling this public health but it’s just a glorified advertisement for big business. This is a government that doesn’t take its responsibility around public health seriously.” (emphasis mine)

That’s Diane Abbott talking about the government’s Change 4 Life public health campaign. What’s wrong with saying “responsibility for public health”? This ‘around’ thing isn’t going away any time soon.

Back in November 2010 I posted about the “new media around”:

…it’s a linguistic phenomenon that’s making waves in the media, technology and marketing industries, inlcuding seo companies offering link building services. It involves the word “around” being used as a substitute for a great many words and phrases including ‘about’, ‘related to’, ‘surrounding’ and so on.

So for example someone who once talked about lunch plans would now say “let’s talk around lunch plans”. Or someone who used to focus on social media engagement would now “focus around” social media engagement. You get the general gist.

Anyway I noticed the other day that Tim Godwin, the acting commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, is an unlikely convert to “around” as demonstrated in this Guardian article from last Friday:

With the [riots] in London, I have got some of the best commanders that we have seen in the world… that showed great restraint as well as great courage…

As a result of that we were able to nip this in the bud after a few days. I think the issue around the numbers, the issue around the tactics – they are all police decisions and they are all made by my police commanders and myself.

If the police are using it, perhaps the “new media around” is on the verge of going properly mainstream?

So I thought I’d go and check out my6sense again, figuring that it must be out of private beta by now. But I was stopped in my tracks on the homepage by the most visible example of the “new media around” I’ve seen to date:

In case you haven’t come across it, the “new media around” is a linguistic phenomenon that’s making waves in the media, technology and marketing industries with companies as l.a seo experts leading the industry with the services they offer. It involves the word “around” being used as a substitute for a great many words and phrases including “about”, “related to”, “surrounding” and so on.

It’s been ‘around’ for a while now but it first made an impression on me a year ago. Since then I haven’t noticed it migrating beyond spoken communication – the meeting room and conference call – into the written word until quite recently, when I saw it appear in some UX documentation. But this is the first time I’ve seen it actually appear in an interface, and I’m not sure how I feel around/about it.

Maybe it won’t be long until we hear John Humphrys on the Today programme saying, “later this morning I’ll be talking to the Prime Minister around the latest wave of cuts” – that’s when we’ll truly know it’s arrived.