Fritinancy

Domain Mastery: Guest Post at DuetsBlog

Today I’m over at DuetsBlog, the trademark-law blog of Minneapolis law firm Winthrop & Weinstine, with a guest post about Internet domains. You say all the .com domains are taken? Dry your tears: I have creative solutions.

Read “Mastering Your Domain.”

P.S. Over at the Catchword naming blog, CatchThis, Laurel Sutton offers another take on finding the right domain (video).

How Snopes.com Got Its Name

When your best friend from high school sends you an URGENT!!! email about the postcard virus, or your Aunt Tillie tells you she’s appalled that a new Pepsi-Cola can omits the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, you know what to do: go directly to Snopes.com to confirm or debunk. (In both of these cases, the latter.)

Since 1995, a California couple, David and Barbara Mikkelson, have run Snopes.com out of their home, doing dogged research into urban legends, “common fallacies, misinformation, old wives’ tales, strange news stories, rumors, celebrity gossip, and similar items” (according to their site’s FAQ).

Why did they name the site Snopes? New York Times technology columnist David Pogue asked David Mikkelson that question for a “CBS Sunday Morning” segment. He excerpted the conversation in his Personal Tech newsletter:

David Pogue: Where does the name Snopes come from?

David Mikkelson: Snopes come [sic] from a family of characters who recur in the works of William Faulkner. He typically had different families that represented a different strata of Southern society. And the Snopes[es] were on the bottom rung of the social ladder. But none of that has anything to do with the site. It just -- I knew the name Snopes from having read William Faulkner.

It was my nom de net. And then when we started the site, it turned out to be sort of fortuitous. Because it is so short and catchy and distinctive.

In the interview, Mikkelson quickly dispenses with several common rumors: Mikey from the Life cereal commercials did not die of an exploded stomach; the Chevy Nova was not a failure in South America because “no va” means “no go”; you cannot see the Great Wall of China from space. Oh, and Barack Obama? He’s not a Muslim. Pass it on.

Read the rest of Pogue’s interview.

Read a New York Times article about Snopes.com from April 2010.

How Chatroulette Got Its Name

Here's a postscript to my Word of the Week entry on the transitive verb next, which has become widespread thanks to the globally popular website Chatroulette.

In her Letter from Moscow in the May 17 New Yorker, Julia Ioffe writes about the origins of Chatroulette in the family apartment of Moscow teenager Andrey Ternovskiy:

Chatroulette.com was originally called Head-to-Head.org, and it came online on August 2, 2009. Ternovskiy’s friends didn’t like it, so he advertised on Web forums. Users trickled in, but the site had glitches, and the name seemed off. So on November 16th, having recently watched the Russian-roulette scene in “The Deer Hunter,” Ternovskiy bought the domain name Chatroulette.com, for seven dollars, and revamped the code. The site took off when a Brazilian soccer fan posted a notice inviting kindred spirits to mill around and talk about the sport. Hundreds of them showed up—at their peak, they constituted half of Chatroulette users—but they didn’t talk about soccer; instead, they took off their clothes.

Why did "Head-to-Head" seem "off"? Possible because the name misleadingly suggested a race or sports contest. "Chatroulette," by contrast, connotes play along with a thrilling element of risk and even danger. (With "Head-to-Head," Ternovskiy may have been aiming for the literal French equivalent, tête à tête, which actually means something closer to "face to face," or "in an intimate manner.")

Ioffe writes:

The technology behind Chatroulette is fairly basic and not particularly new. But by combining video-chatting technology and randomization Ternovskiy has bucked a decade-long trend that has made the Internet feel progressively more organized, pleasant, and safe. Google (founded in 1998) makes sure you pull up less flotsam when you search. Social networks like Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), and Facebook (2004) let you stay in touch with a network of people you already know. Privacy settings keep out the ones you don’t. Twitter (2006) feeds you information from sources you choose to follow. Now Chatroulette has come along and showed us that we want chaos, too.

Telling It Like It Is

I learned this week about three business names that, while not technically descriptive—inadvisable from a trademark-law perspective—do express very clearly what they're all about.

1. Subvert and Profit is a social-media crowdsourcing company that pays tiny fees—averaging 75 cents for each action—to "users" (not, you will note, "employees" or even "contractors") who "fan" designated Facebook pages; follow designated Twitter accounts; or tweet specified URLs, hashtags, or phrases.* According to PR Web, a new "It Pays to Be Popular on Facebook and Twitter" campaign will award bonuses "based on a the number of friends and followers a User has on their Facebook and Twitter accounts." According to Subvert and Profit's own FAQ, this technique is "30 to 100 times more cost effective than conventional Internet marketing." The first Q in the FAQ is "Isn't this illegal?" Answer: "No. Violating a Web site's Terms of  Use is not illegal." (Via Scott Monty.)

2. Traif, a new restaurant in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, specializes in pork and shellfish, both of which are the ultimate in nonkosher foods—that is, they are traif (a Yiddish word sometimes spelled tref or treyf). In many parts of the country, such a restaurant would barely attract notice, but Williamsburg happens to be home to one of the largest communities of ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York. It's also home, as Bari Weiss reports in the Wall Street Journal, to a distinct yet equally devout sect: the hipsters.

The Artisten, as the Hasidim call them, obediently don their skinny jeans, fanny packs and granny glasses. They smoke Parliaments and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon while they bop, understatedly, to indie music. Irony is studied as carefully as the Talmud.

"Though there have been some blog posts praying for Traif's demise," Weiss writes, "as of this week, most Hasidim had not yet heard of the place. Those who had weren't offended. A Hasidic man I spoke to said he found the name 'kind of funny and cool'."

3. TBD, a common acronym for "To Be Determined," is the official name of a new Washington, DC, metro news site that encountered predicable naming challenges in its early days.** "We came very close to securing a name more than once," the TBD home page discloses, "but each time an obstacle – a divided staff, a greedy domain holder, a trademark problem – blocked the way." One of the founders, Erik Wemple, began signing his emails "Editor, TBD.com."

Before long, we realized Erik had stumbled upon the perfect name for our site. The traditional news culture is that you don’t publish or broadcast a story until all the questions are answered, all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted. The evening newscast or morning newspaper is presented as a finished product, the culmination of a day’s work for the news staff.

But TBD will never be a finished product. On the web, on mobile devices and on our 24-hours cable news channel, we’ll always be in motion: constantly updating, improving and evolving; seeking more details, reaction or community conversation. We’ll be a place you visit to watch the news unfold in real time.

"This has to be, in my opinion, the coolest new journalism brand I’ve seen come along in a very long time," gushed Cory Britton on Lost Remote, which covers hyperlocal journalism. "Now let’s see if the site, scheduled to launch this summer, will live up to the hype."

The first TBD.com story I'd like to see: an exposé of how much Wemple et al. paid for that highly desirable three-letter .com domain.

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* This is a type of Turking, the wired world's version of piecework at slave wages.

** t.b.d. is also the name of a women's clothing department at Nordstrom. I've been waiting for years for that department to make up its mind.

 

 

New Name Beat: Tungle

Disclaimer: Tungle isn't really new, just new to me. The company, which makes technology that simplifies the scheduling of meetings, was founded in Montreal in 2006. But I first heard about Tungle only last week, when its owners offered to underwrite a Social Media Breakfast I had signed up for.

I was grateful for Tungle's sponsorship and impressed by the brief presentation of company co-founder and CEO Marc Gingras. I'm glad to see the company is receiving glowing testimonials. (I haven't used the service myself.) But "Tungle" strikes me as a naming misfire.

Sure, it's short and pronounceable, if not euphonious. It's coined, but it resembles real English words.

That's the good news. And the bad?

Local Words of the Year

City Dictionary, a user-built "city guide organized in an easy-to-use dictionary format," has just announced its Local Words of the Year.

Check out the list to discover what sconnie, meat raffle, neutral ground, polio water, and slugging mean in their respective U.S. cities.

And poke around the nicely designed site to read definitions of featured words, participate in a poll (how do you pronounce pecan?), and contribute a local term of your own. My contribution: hella, in the Oakland section.

UPDATE: I've fixed the first City Dictionary link (apologies!). And here's a just-published blog post by City Dictionary founder Thomas Carmona that explains the selection process for Local Words of the Year.

December Linkfest

Didn't get everything on your Chanukah list? Haven't received any Festivus invitations? Cheer up: I have goodies to spare.

First course, more year-end lists:

• The Guardian (U.K.) selects its "Noughtyisms," a year-by-year list of the decade's best words. They place cougar in 2005; I had it on my 2009 list. Hat tip: Sherry Noik.

• Separated by a Common Language announces the best American-to-British and British-to-American imports of 2009.

• Minneapolis naming agency Pollywog picks its best and worst brand names of 2009. I disagree about Bing—I think it's a pretty good name—but I agree about the rest.

• This just in: The German word of the year is Abwrackprämie (literally: "wrecking premium"), the equivalent of "cash for clunkers." Runner-up: kriegsähnliche Zustände, or “war-like conditions,” used to describe the situation faced by German troops in Afghanistan.

And looking toward the new year:

• From Trendwatching, 10 consumer trends to watch in 2010, including "(F)luxury," "Maturialism," and "Urbany."

A couple of enjoyable time-wasters—uh, research opportunities:

• SlangSite, "a dictionary of slang, webspeak, made-up words, and colloquialisms." I'm partial to qiken (pronounced chicken), "used to describe chicken cooked in an Asian style." Hat tip:  Dick Margulis, author of an excellent blog on writing, publishing, editing, and web design.

• WordCount, a brilliant interactive display of the 86,000+ most commonly used words in (British) English. Hat tip: Descriptively Adequate.

In anticipation of Festivus, with its annual Airing of Grievances, here are a couple of grievances about relationships between designers and clients. Equally applicable to name developers and copywriters, to be sure. (I'll air more grievances on the actual holiday, Dec. 23.)

• Eight ways to kill an idea. Beautifully illustrated, painfully true. Hat tip: Catch This.

• How a web design goes straight to hell. With very few changes, could apply to writing and naming projects.

Finally, here's a bit of, uh, breaking naming news you may have missed: The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education has announced a new name for the hymen: vaginal corona. In Swedish: slidkrans. Thanks a million for that link, Wes Phillips.

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Image: Festivus ice cream, a seasonal flavor produced by Ben & Jerry's in the early 2000s, brought back by popular demand in 2006, and now retired.

Brands of the Decade: 2000-2009

In compiling this list, I found myself marveling that—despite two serious economic downturns— so many major brands were founded, or came to prominence, during the '00s. My list is slightly skewed toward my personal interests—technology and retail—but I think it's a fair reflection of the decade. My criteria for selection:

• Founded during the first decade of the 21st century or shortly before or
• Had a significant impact on the way we do business or live our lives during this decade or
• Consistently made headlines during the decade (for better or worse).

Missing from the list: Amazon and eBay, which were founded in 1994 and 1995, respectively, and had already made a significant impact in the 1990s. And I've placed some other familiar brands in my Brands of the Year list, here. coming next week.

As they say, your mileage may vary. If your choices are different from mine, I invite you to leave a comment and share them.

In alphabetical order:

Word of the Week: Flash Sale

Flash sale: A limited-time online sales event open only to registered members of a website.

The real-world versions of flash sales—sample sales and invitation-only private sales—aren't new, but the concept came to the Web relatively recently and has been gathering momentum. In February 2008 Forbes magazine wrote about the U.S. pioneer of flash sales, Gilt Groupe, founded in 2007, which borrowed its business model (and possible the spelling of "Groupe") from a French site, vente-privee.com, that had launched in 2001. 

Gilt had the territory to itself for a while, but now it's been joined by other "exclusive" sites (a misnomer, because invitations are easy to score) such as RueLaLa (bought in October by e-commerce company GSI Commerce), Totsy, Ideeli, and HauteLook. These sites sell clothing and accessories; others offer home furnishings and even travel packages. All of the sites take advantage of surplus inventory and the retail recession and build demand by limiting "membership" and keeping sales brief—usually two or three days. And they represent a rare bright spot in the retail picture.

From a Dec. 6 article in the New York Times, "Secret's Out: Sample Sales Move Online":

The business model is simple: the sites buy mostly overstocked clothing and accessories from brand-name designers, then discount them deeply. Adrenaline-pumped shoppers rush to get the deals because the items are often gone in a few hours.

The sites try to recreate the rush of a warehouse sample sale, minus the trampling and shoving, but they borrow as much from the Home Shopping Network as they do from Saks Fifth Avenue. After shoppers add an item to their cart at Gilt, for example, they get a 10-minute countdown before they lose the item.

Meanwhile, according to Business Week:

Vente-Privee.com has expanded to Germany, Spain, Italy, and the U.K., and has now worked with more than 600 brands in luxury apparel, wine, home decor, and other areas. In 2007, Boston-based venture capital firm Summit Partners acquired a 20% stake that valued Vente-Privee.com at about $1 billion. Dozens of copycat sites have sprung up in France, fueling a substantial e-commerce industry there.

Compare flash mob and flash memory.

AOL Dot Dot Com

AOL, which began life 20 years ago as America Online, next month will become Aol. when it spins off from Time Warner. And no, the period after "Aol" is not a typo. On the contrary, it's an opportunity for C-level executives to exhibit their A-plus storytelling abilities.

Here's what (Ms.) Sam Wilson, managing director of the New York office of Wolff Olins, the agency that effected the transformation, told the New York Times:

The period in the logo was added to suggest “confidence, completeness,” Ms. Wilson said, by declaring that “AOL is the place to go for the best content online, period.”

Tim Armstrong, AOL's chairman and chief executive officer, likes the period so much that he's given it a nickname:

Mr. Armstrong said he liked to describe the period as “the AOL dot” because “the dot is the pivot point for what comes after AOL,” whether it is e-mail, Web sites or coming offerings that will “surprise people.”

Gee, they get all that out of a period? I'd love to hear them spin the interrobang.

I think that Aol. will still be pronounced ay-oh-ell, at least officially. I, however, propose to call it aoili. Very tasty with asparagus.

Seriously, though, if anyone there is listening: Nobody outside your company cares about your cute punctuation. No newspaper is going to comply with your internal style guide. Normal people write Macy's, not Macy*s, E-Trade, not E*TRADE, and Guess, not Guess?* Bill Walsh, a copy chief at the Washington Post who blogs at The Slot, devotes a chapter to this subject in his invaluable book The Elephants of Style. He writes:

I find a certain satisfaction ... in observing that the Web's conventions permit no decorative punctuation in addresses--it's www.yahoo.com and www.etrade.com. Those who lowercase the names of all Web companies should think about this.

Back to today's headlines:

Here's the AOL press release. (Yes, it includes the word "passionate." What did you expect? Also "uniquely dynamic," "world-class experiences," and "bold and exciting.")

PR Daily points out that AOL also plans to lowercase a third of its staff: that is, lay them off. (Hat tip: John Ochwat.)

Read what some British designers have to say about the redesigned AOL logo.

Read what Om Malik of GigaOm has to say.

And for an extra helping of snark, read Ad Age, which has posted an obituary for AOL's long-running mascot, Running Man. (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.) I'll get you started:

Our copy desk has a suggestion of where you can stick that period ... uhm, right next to Yahoo's exclamation point.

UPDATE: Brand New, a design blog that specializes in before-and-after critiques, has published a long post about Aol. that includes many proof-of-concept images.

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* I love the story, possibly apocryphal, about the woman who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the "Guess?" logo. A stranger approached her on the street, appraised her chest, and said, "Um ... 34DD?"