Come and get ‘em! Whether you are a zorbing metrosexual or a Google-bombing hasbian, here are your buzzwords of the year from the New York Times (A to Z), The Word Spy (Top 100), Your Dictionary (top 10 in various categories) and, to see what words people search for most on Google, the Google Zeitgeist.

Happy New Year. Or rather, Hippy Nude Year. Or Hopi Now Hear! Or….

AOL has launched Love.com. According to an article on Instant Messaging Planet:

The secret sauce in AOL’s Love.com stems from its close integration with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), and its ability to exploit some of the unique benefits of IM communications. At the site, Love.com members can browse profiles, find others who are online and available to IM, and can immediately initiate chat sessions with them.

With Love.com, AOL is getting into the increasingly competitive meet marketplace of social networks, which includes such popular places to hook up online as Yahoo! Personals, Lavalife and Tickle. Unfortunately, AOL’s system is proprietary, so users will be locked-in to using the AOL Instant Messenger software. Make this Love(.com) AOL-American Style.

An even bigger problem from a branding perspective is calling the site Love.com instead of simply Love, which is much more powerful. AOL has apparently just joined the Internet frenzy circa 1996, when many were seized by the notion that owning and promoting a primary word domain name for your company name (think Pets.com, Business.com, Drugstore.com etc.) was the secret to instant riches. The problem that most of those companies discovered to their chagrin is that generic words have no long-term brand value–they’re essentially empty vessels.

Love is different. Love is not generic, but one of highest of evocative aspirations. AOL should be creating a Love brand, not diluting it by calling it Love.com. Adding “.com” to a name was a novelty in the mid-’90s, when the Net was new, but once everybody had a website, the novelty quickly faded. To call it Love.com is to cheapen it, to pull the higher aspirations back down to earth, to associate the idea of Love with mere process, technology, and all the miserable lost luster of the popped Internet bubble.

This brand myopia is made even more explicit by the choice of tagline, which follows to the letter the most clichéd of Net Bubble Company tagline structures, that of three solitary words each followed by a period (for emphasis, you see):

Search. Find. Connect.

Again, it’s all about the process, not about emotional engagement with the brand. Love.com could be any online dating service; the only difference here is the restriction to AOL users and the fact that it probably has the most expensive domain name of the bunch. But sadly, that domain name is just being wasted in this effort.

Capitalism gangsta style: Irv “Gotti” Lorenzo, founder of Murder Inc., announced recently that the record company has changed its name to The Inc. The jury’s out whether the chairman of the board will give up his gangsta moniker “Gotti” in favor of something more like Capitalist Tool:

Gotti said the name change is meant to shed any negativity surrounding his business. He revealed that he initially intended to name the label Lockdown Records.

When Gotti saw the story of the real Murder Incorporated gang on television, he decided to use it, hoping to create a name he could brand, such as Death Row or Bad Boy.

According to a recent article in the Guardian, hip hop’s mania for endorsing brands makes street music big in the boardroom:

Such is the symbiotic relationship between hip hop and big business that marketing guru Lucian James created American Brandstand, which lists weekly the brands that feature in the lyrics of songs in the American chart.

…Some artists are said to be paid to incorporate brand names into their lyrics, an accusation levelled at Rhymes following ‘Pass the Courvoisier’. Rhymes and Allied Domecq deny the claim.

Ya think? The power of hip hop artists like Busta Rhymes to reach a young audience of impressionable minds is not missed by brand masters like Richard Branson, who recently hired the rapper to star in a series of entertaining adverts for a Busta Butt campaign for Virgin Mobile.

Corporate interests are buying control in the hood; witness the acquisition of Russell Simmons‘ Def Jam Records by Universal Music Group. It’s big bidness; what the Feds call “organized crime.” And the entertainment industry needs to clean up the gangsta image of hip hop, as it did the mobster image of Las Vegas.

The 2003 Grammy Award nominations announcement, dominated by hip hop, rap and R&B artists, is noted as a significant benchmark in the acceptance of the music of the street into popular culture, worldwide.

Hip-hop, both the music and the lifestyle, have slowly taken over the world in which you live. Television, magazines, radio and video games have all jumped aboard. The aging public and the music industry are among the last to recognize the genre’s immense output and goliath success, but that’s changing, too.

You gotta kno dat hip hop is takin’ over da world when the communist government of the People’s Republic of China is remixing Mousie Tongue.

Now, as they approach the 110th anniversary of Mao Tse-Tung’s birth, Dec. 26, the people of China – a country the old murderer would scarcely recognize anymore – are going to get a chance to refresh their memory of one of his key dictums, the Two Musts, in the form of rap music.

It’s not altogether a message that matches the hip-hop lifestyle which we in the West know so well from videos, CDs and court cases. The Two Musts run like this: “to preserve modesty and prudence, and to preserve the style of plain living and hard struggle.”

As lifestyle advice, this seems to leave little room for bling-bling, hos, nose candy, late nights and big cars. Still, the rap format has been adopted by many Chinese performers and is popular with Chinese audiences (formerly known as “the masses”). Talk about your cultural revolutions.

Will rap music be credited with the demise of communism in China, as rock and roll has recently been credited with the end of communism in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union? Will rap be the language of cultural revolution in the Far East and in the Middle East? Fo’ shizzle…