Many a maven: nice word

This morning I learned a useful new word.

Maven. So much cooler than guru.

I'm sure it's not new to you. My belated discovery just shows I don't live in the world of Open Source Java. And it shouldn't be new to me as I apparently encountered it in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

According to Wikipedia (sorry) a maven is:

a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. The word maven comes from the Hebrew, via Yiddish, and means one who understands, based on an accumulation of knowledge.

Of course maven, as a lovely and unusual word, has been press-ganged into branding wineries and business consultants and search engines and you name it and good on them. Meanwhile, way back in 1976, a baby was named Maven Huffmann and grew into the name... as a WWE professional wrestler.

Yes indeed, becoming a maven is fine aspiration.

But wait... are mavens really people who answer people who don't answer people? That was the conclusion Marc Smith reached in a netscan episode four years ago. On social network sites, that might not necessarily be the same thing as an expert.

Image: Maven Huffman