Clearly The Name Inspector has not been participating in NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). He’s been working on a secret project. But now he plans to up the posting rate a bit.
Radar Networks recently introduced their first Semantic Web application: Twine. In a presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit, Radar Networks founder and CEO Nova […]

TrenchMice is a site where people can share inside scoops about the companies where they work. Trenchmouse John has written a great post about how they came up with the name TrenchMice. This is one of the best, most thorough naming stories that The Name Inspector has come across.
John wrote the post in response to […]

The Name Inspector is at Gnomedex right now. Vanessa Fox, who founded Google Webmaster Central and now works at Zillow, just led an impromptu discussion about, among other things, how you become a brand when you have a heavy online presence. That fact has created a new world of naming, and Vanessa has a crazy […]

Next week The Name Inspector will be attending Gnomedex, a technology conference/unconference that happens in Seattle. (If you’re also going to be there, come find The Name Inspector and say hi.) That makes this a great time to write about the name Gnomedex.
To understand this name, you first need to know (if you don’t already) […]

A couple months back The Name Inspector had lunch with Brian Dorsey. Brian talked about a kooky idea he had for a website: people would specify a date and a geographical area and get matched up with random strangers via email to meet for lunch.
Brian really likes to go out for lunch. He works […]

Tags: victrola, coffee, cafe, coffeehouse, sign, signs, capitol-hill, capitolhill, seattle

Microsoft recently unveiled Surface, a tabletop computer with an amazing multi-touch interface. There’s no keyboard or mouse–you interact with Surface through its display, which is touch-sensitive and can respond to simultaneous touches from multiple fingers or people. That means you can “grab” objects and move them around, re-size photos by stretching them out with your […]

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 […]

A while ago Allegra Searle-LeBel sent in a story about naming her online media-editing startup:
We had been struggling for about 2 months, trying to find the right name. There was this funny, almost mystical sense that it existed *somewhere*. We just needed to keep slogging through the troughs of lame options and almost […]

On Monday The Name Inspector hosted a Biznik workshop and everyone discussed the name of the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. It’s an interesting case study in selecting a real word to serve as a business name.
The word flicker clearly evokes scenarios associated with light and photography. One person said it reminded her of movie projectors […]