Many in the IT community have never forgiven the media for twisting the original meaning of hacker. Despair not, though - the constructivist spirit advocated by the likes of Eric S. Raymond and Richard Stallman is not dead.

Many in the IT community have never forgiven the media for twisting the original meaning of hacker. Despair not, though - the constructivist spirit advocated by the likes of Eric S. Raymond and Richard Stallman is not dead.

On the modern Web with its millions of users, the original ideas of hacking have resurfaced on a mass scale as lifehacking - a phenomenon noted even by American linguists.

Bought an electronic airline ticket and want to check in through business class even though you haven’t got a boarding pass? Wondering what the best months are for buying household appliances, houses or toys? Want to lower your mortgage payments? Or maybe easily extend your iPod’s functionality without invalidating the warranty? Lifehacking has the answers to all these questions and thousands more, being dedicated to making life easier through the use of cunning, intelligence and skill. The Internet is the perfect medium for sharing this knowledge with others - after all, what fun is a clever hack if you don’t share it with others?

All computer geeks and hackers know this to be true, so it is no surprise that lifehacking originated from these circles. Improving operating systems and software as well as finding and patching bugs all demand innovative shortcuts - and lifehacking is basically all about hacks to make our lives easier.

In the beginning was the iPod

The origins of the term are lost in the mists of time. Like much Web-based parlance, lifehacking just sort of sprouted up. However, the efforts of the IT community alone could never have sufficed to popularise the term on the scale currently seen in the US. What it needed was a mass electronic product that would be loved by ordinary people and computer geeks alike - and Steve Jobs’s company provided just the thing. Users have come to love their iPods, in spite of their occasional shortcomings, both more and less serious. How can you make Windows 98 detect an iPod? How can you load video into an iPod without using iTunes? What unofficial plugins can you use to extend iPod functionality? Where outside iTunes can you find interesting podcasts?

The white media players with their cute apple logo have provoked thousands of questions. Most of them were answered more quickly and eagerly by other Internet users than by Apple technical support, and it was on the iPod user forums that lifehacking became a known and popular term. Most of the advice was provided by educated and active Internet users, frequently bloggers.

After that, it was downhill all the way. Blogs spread the word, and numerous how-to’s sprouted up, often quite unrelated to MP3 players. Lifehacking quickly became a buzzword, at least in the US. In December 2005, editors from Oxford University Press gathered to traditionally summarise new English vocabulary items deemed to have had the most effect on mass language culture. And bingo - lifehack appeared in the company of sudoku, rootkit and bird flu. So what if podcast won.

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