One of the most popular blogs tracked by Technorati (currently #14) is PostSecret. It’s a “community art project” where people anonymously submit their secrets on postcards, and it’s quite compelling, in an emotionally voyeuristic kind of way. You find all the juicy stuff you’d expect to find: confessions and accusations of infidelity, descriptions of other real and imagined transgressions, proclamations of love, self-destructive and suicidal thoughts, blasphemy. There’s also funny and just plain weird stuff.

The name PostSecret is pretty straightforward, but also unsettling in a way that’s appropriate for this material. There’s just something a little strange about it. The issue is ambiguity, and the way it complicates the structure and pronunciation of the name.

The big culprit here is the word post. It has not one, not two, but three meanings that are pressed into duty in this name. First there’s the meaning that makes this word a synonym of mail, which we find in the expressions post office and, of course, postcard. Then there’s the meaning that we use when we talk about posting to our blogs. Finally, there’s the meaning that we find in expressions like postmodern.

These three meanings tug us in different directions when we’re trying to combine post with secret to make sense of the name. Matters are complicated further by the fact that secret is both a noun and an adjective. We might think of the name PostSecret as being analogous to postcard, in which case secret is a noun that replaces card. We might try to think of post as a verb, but then the name would be more natural if it were PostSecrets or PostASecret or PostYourSecrets–the bare noun secret just doesn’t fit. Finally, we can think of the name as being like postmodern, in which case secret is an adjective, and the post- prefix suggests that these things are no longer ordinary secrets once they appear on the site.

When we interpret this name as being analogous to postmodern, we are likely to want place the main emphasis on the first syllable of secret. But the prevalence of compound names creates a pressure to treat this name as a compound, like postcard, and put the main emphasis on post. An internal struggle ensues.

The postmodern-like interpretation of the name is the most complex and satisfying. Just as postmodern doesn’t simply mean ‘no longer modern’, but rather describes something after modernism that incorporates and/or reacts to a modernist perspective, PostSecret seems to indicate a new type of thing made possible by the web: freely shared “secrets” that are secret only in the sense that they can’t be connected to individual people. These deep dark “secrets” take on a new life when viewed in the aggregate–patterns emerge, people’s common preoccupations are revealed, and things start to seem a little less dark, if not less deep. As the Name Inspector’s spouse says, “Well, we live in a post-secret age, don’t we?”.

Tags: postsecret, the name postsecret, secrets, art, community art, postmodern

Last month Rogelio Bernal Andreo shared this naming story with The Name Inspector:

The story of coRank is a bit unusual. Back early last year I was thinking of launching a couple of services and wasn’t sure what name to pick (you know how “easy” is to grab a decent .com these days), so I ended up grabbing coRank.com and coTrack.com.

Then I got busy and those services (that were RSS feed related) never materialized.

Then I came with the idea of what coRank is today: a web-based service that would alow anyone to create their own social news network, or, in simple terms, their own Digg-like service (I try to stay away from using the clone term, as I think we have a different goal than just enabling people to create Digg clones, although it’s the easiest way people understand what coRank is about).

So then we started to look for a good .com name for the service. And we searched, and searched, and visited sedo.com 10 times a day, etc. And we were like that for 2-3 weeks until it struck me: “Wait a sec, I already have coRank.com, I have no use for it, and the name seems to me to be perfect for a service like this one!” coRank - cooperative ranking, people ranking things in a cooperative fashion, etc… It made sense and so we went for it.

And that’s the unusual part of it. I’m sure this is not the first site for which the name had been registered even before the idea came up and when the idea came, we weren’t trying to give a service to a name, but there probably aren’t many cases where this happened, and the name and idea actually married so well

This is a pretty funny coincidence. The name coRank is almost too descriptive, as if Rogelio had not traveled far enough in the naming process. But in fact he traveled a great distance, and ended up with a name that he created before his web app had even been conceived. Is it possible, Rogelio, that you got the idea for your app from the name?

Probably not.

While The Name Inspector often discourages people from using names that are too literally descriptive, in some cases they’re appropriate. This is one of those cases. Descriptive names often work when what you’re naming (a company, a product, a service) doesn’t fall into any recognized category and people need help understanding what you’re up to. That’s almost what’s going on here. Well, actually this case is a bit more complicated than that. coRank is in danger of falling into the category “Digg clone”–that is, of being defined in terms of one particular more prominent web app. If it had a suggestive name like Digg, it might have more trouble escaping the clone label. The name coRank stands out for being more descriptive of a Digg-like service than even the name Digg is. So it works pretty well even though it’s not the most colorful and interesting name in the world. It’s easy to pronounce and understand, and it gets poetic symmetry from the initial and final [k] sounds.

Thanks for your story, Rogelio. Congratulations on finding a use for that name you had sitting around, and good luck with the business.

Tags: corank, the name corank, digg, social network, social news

Shelly Farnham and Peter Brown are the co-founders of Waggle Labs, a Seattle software and consulting company that specializes in social technology. Their new product, Pathable, lets participants in social events tag themselves with their interests and personal connections to find other similar participants. Shelly and Peter were kind enough to share a story about how they came up with these names. Here’s what they wrote (in the third person) about Waggle Labs:

Their goal was to have a name that reflected on the one side their creativity and sense of fun, and on the other side their extensive advanced prototyping and social science backgrounds. They brainstormed through a number of names with their friend Leo sitting in front of a whiteboard that had words like “social, innovative, fun, creative, smart, technology, internet, web” written on it.

Shelly and Peter had both been through the process of naming projects a number of times before, and had each developed a trust in their instinctive response to names (that “blink” reaction as described by Malcom Gladwell — he argues that through rapid cognitions we often reach instant conclusions that are “really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good”). [link http://www.gladwell.com/blink/] The goal was to brainstorm through and develop a name they both instinctively liked. They both read a lot of science fiction, so one of the final contenders was General Galactic. Peter loved it, Shelly less so.

“It sounds like General Electric.” She recalls saying.

“But that’s great!” said Peter. “We can leverage residual name recognition.”

“Mmmm. But, General Electric! It is a very masculine name, brings to mind heavy machinery.”

Shelly was a part of an informal art group called Hive-Mind, referring to the emergent intelligence of collective organisms. [Link to Jordan's bee blog: http://hive-mind.com/bee/blog/ ] For her, bees and hives had a strong association with the power of the collective intelligence of the Internet. “What about something to with the Waggle Dance?” She thought the word waggle evoked a sense of lighthearted fun and the Waggle dance is a really amazing phenomenon:

From wikipedia:

Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honeybee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar or pollen, or both, and to water sources.

Through innovative social technology they hoped to enhance people’s social experiences, providing direction to the online honey, so to speak. So Waggle Labs seemed like a great fit. After their brainstorming session they took a day to run both names by their friends: “What do you think, General Galactic or Waggle Labs?”. After twenty four hours of mulling over the issue, they decided to go with Waggle Labs. Much later, a few people pointed out the similarity between Waggle Labs and Google Labs — to which Shelly would shrug and smile and say “well I guess we can leverage residual name recognition.”

Despite the similarity to Google Labs, The Name Inspector is happy that Shelly and Peter decided to go with Waggle Labs. The great thing about this name is that it sounds really playful but has a serious and deeply interesting scientific association. The bee waggle dance is a fascinating case of animal communication that’s gotten a good deal of academic attention. The Name Inspector even had reason to learn about it during his linguistic training. Linguists like the waggle dance both because it shows how complex animal communication can be, and because it’s quite unlike human language, so it helps to show what makes the latter special. Among other things, human language has what Charles Hockett called duality of patterning–one system that defines discrete building blocks of sound (phonology), and a separate one that uses those building blocks to define meaningful units (lexicon) and their combinations (morphosyntax). That’s what allows us humans to have a such a big vocabulary and a limitless repertoire of messages. But The Name Inspector digresses.

Here’s what Shelly and Peter wrote about Pathable:

One of their projects is Pathable (still under development), an event-based social networking tool that explores the use of lightweight profiles with social tagging for matchmaking. They agreed upon the name with that same mutual, instinctive response. Shelly originally wanted to go with SpiderTap. The spider in the web is another metaphor for online social interactions that Shelly always liked. “You tap the strands you’ve spread through the web, see where there’s a wiggle, and move in that direction.” Peter did not like spiders however. They then thought through a few more names around the metaphor of finding the shortest path between two points. “Pathable!” simply leapt into Peter’s brain. He immediately went online, saw that it was available as a domain name, and said “that’s the one”. It seems like an expensive domain name and yet cost them only $8. Shelly agreed it was a good name, recognizing most people disliked spiders, and that their instinctive, negative reactions were not easily overcome. She also thought Pathable had somehow a more business-y ring to it, which fit the target group of the project.

Pathable sounds like a real word but is not, so they got to create their own definition:

pathable (păthə-bəl, päthə-bəl) adj.

To supply with the means, knowledge, or opportunity to discover the hidden courses upon which things move.

The Name Inspector also likes the name Pathable. It’s a strange but lovable beast. While it does have an oddly natural ring to it, it has a notable peculiarity. Do you see it?

Pathable is strange because the suffix -able normally attaches to verbs (readable, useable, believable, etc.), and path is a noun. In the name Pathable we interpret path as a verb because the suffix forces us to. This is a type of what linguists call coercion, which of course is just a fancy scientific way of saying the same thing. The coercion of path into a verbal interpretation gives this name a unique dynamic quality and a hook that really makes it hang on in memory.

What accounts for the natural feel of Pathable, considering that it’s grammatically anomalous? Partly it’s the fact that there are so many words in English that are both verbs and nouns, and many of them regularly occur with the suffix -able (e.g. lovable, notable, debatable, etc.). This might make people subconsciously get used to seeing nouns followed by -able, even though they know these words are supposed to be functioning as verbs in this context.

The Name Inspector would like to congratulate Shelly and Peter, wish them luck with their venture, and thank them for giving him an excuse to talk about geeky linguistic stuff.

Tags: waggle labs, the name waggle labs, waggle, waggle dance, bee waggle dance, pathable, the name pathable, coercion, suffix, suffixation, affix, affixation, social technology

What follows is a story from Dan McComb, one of the founders of Biznik, a Seattle-based social network for independent business people. Dan’s story is so well told that it’s quoted in its entirety here.

By the way, the Name Inspector gets a real kick out of the name Biznik, but, as a Biznik member who has had some correspondence with Dan, and who spoke on the same stage as Dan in the first Ignite Seattle event, he is not entirely unbiased.

Biznik was originally The Biz Group. A totally unremarkable and non-trademarkable name. But one that made it clear what we were about – business. But our group wasn’t just about business – it was about indie business, business that thinks outside of the box, that isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo; bootstrapping business, progressive, sustainable business. I wanted a name that:

1. Contained within it an allusion to what the group is all about
2. Was short and memorable
3. The domain name was available.
4. We could trademark
5. Ideally, would be a made-up name so that it’s easy to track every single reference to it, ever, on the Internet, using Google alerts.

I spent hours doing who-is lookups, and finding every cool name I could think of was already owned by somebody. Somebody, who when asked, wanted on average $6,000 to part with it. No thanks.

Some names we considered: Bizgroove (our lawyer advised it was too much like Groove Networks, which Microsoft purchased), radicalselfpromotion, bizfire, bizgroupies, and a long list of even worse options. After a couple of weeks of fruitless searching, I remembered something I once heard about creativity – “creativity is the art of absurd combinations.” I thought, why don’t I just start randomly tacking arbitrary suffixes onto “biz” and see what happens. I manage a lot of web sites, so that means I manage a lot of passwords. And one thing I’ve done for a long time is tack made-up suffixes onto real words, to get something that isn’t in the dictionary, but is memorable. One of the suffixes I used to use was n!k. As in, passwordn!k. When I thought of tacking that onto biz to create Biznik, I looked it up, and the .com domain was available. I immediately thought, that’s a stupid name – if nobody else wants it, why would I want it? So I skipped over it and kept trying other combinations, without finding anything satisfying. A few days later I came back to Biznik in my head, and ran it by my partner Lara. It occurred to both of us that it might be pretty good – it met all of our naming goals, and more – it contained an allusion to radical (beatniks, sputnik), and business (biz). I tried it out on a couple of my friends and they all liked it immediately, a reaction that hadn’t happened in the previous possible names I’d shared with them. So I went back to the computer, and sure enough, the domain was still available – I purchased it for 8 bucks.

I later found out that -nik is a Yiddish suffix that means “to have an affinity for.” And the final bonus is that members of Biznik can be referred to as “Bizniks.” It’s a multi-purpose name, and as time has passed we realize how lucky we were to get it. In fact, we discovered it by using waybackmachine.com; the domain had been previously owned by someone in London, who had let it lapse literally a few months before we stumbled on it. How cool is that?

Great story. The Name Inspector would like to thank Dan from the bottom of his heart for not naming this business Bizfire. That would have been a real Mizfire.

Biznik is lots of fun and a great name. It’s the holy grail of domain names: one that carries the right meaning in six letters or less. (An aside: This six-letter rule seems to be received wisdom in the world of web names–does anyone know how it got started?). Combining biz with the radical connotations of the suffix -nik is a surprising and funny juxtaposition that gives this name real personality. Of course, -nik is not really radical in a threatening way. It ironically evokes the Cold War era, and its Yiddish origin, its association with beatnik, and its diminutive sound give it a kind of lighthearted friendliness.

Phonetically the name is great, with the repeated vowel sound and the smooth transition between the sounds [z] and [n], which are similarly pronounced. Biznik is nice orthographically, too, with the two strikingly angular letters z and k and the repetition of the letter i.

Nice name, Dan, and thanks for your story.

Tags: biznik, the name biznik, social networking, business networking, networking