The UK Telegraph included a book review of Why Not Catch-21? The Stories Behind the Titles that got me thinking about some other naming conventions.
- Name your book something pedestrian but enigmatic. Name it after something ordinary, but nothing too specific.
- Name your website an english word; you can allow one spelling error or clever punctuation, but don’t get all cutesy. NO AFRICAN WORDS.
- Go ahead and give your movie a long name, as the title of the remakes will be shorter, and shorter, and shorter…
- Name your video game using three words or less, something like “Ms. Pac-Man” or “Guitar Hero 2” and not “Guitar Hero Encore Rocks the 80s”. Only sequels should have a colon in the title. (And no, a sequel to a sequel does not get two colons.)
- Do not name your kids after proper nouns.
I don’t know whether timtoon necessarily passes this test, but I’ll bet it fares a lot better than Ubuntu or Utterz. Or just anything starting with a U. For example, you know what you’ll find in My Space, what’s in a Face Book, what to expect from a Live Journal, and what’s kept in an Image Bucket more so than what happens when you’re Flickr’d.
But a name is only part of having a successful site, and since I’m going to forget these helpful tips to having good content, I’ll link to them from a site called websitesthatsuck.com (can you guess what they have there?):
Blogs only work when they meet four of the following five conditions:
- Candor
- Urgency
- Timeliness
- Pithiness
- Controversy
Content Trumps Design.
I don’t even want to think about how my site rates there.
And while we’re at it, the ages-old list of bad domain names.