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Web person at the Imperial War Museum, just completed PhD about digital sustainability in museums (the original motivation for this blog was as my research diary). Posting occasionally, and usually museum tech stuff but prone to stray. I welcome comments if you want to take anything further. These are my opinions and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else (unless they thought of them too). Twitter: @jottevanger

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

There must be a name for this

That's it, I've had enough! Browsing the latest flurry of flim-flam from TechCrunch I found myself getting more and more cheesy at the current crop of crap names. OK so we're all used to mini-trends in the names that no-hoper start-ups go with - like the batch of second-ratrs (sic) that followed Flickr's success and ended their name with "[$consonant]r". Dopplr, Grazr, Etceterr. Funnily enough it's the fact that Twitter chose to name itself using the final vowel in the midst of that lame craze that makes me hate it less.

Nowadays it's all about the Ell: crap names ending with "...l" or "...le". OK so some names have been round for ever and make sense in their own way - to whit, Apple, Google - and others are more recent but might make sense still - Clickable, for example (no, "for example" is not a name, yet), even Pipl. I sort of forgive Amazon's Kindle (it's hardware anyway) but despite the fact it sort of relates to it's function I start to lose patience with Huddle, and having passed through Moodle, Oodle and Wonderfl we reach Trackle. Truly execrable. And slightly off the racing line, there's Twhirl.

Finally on the subject of appalling names from startups which will 90% certainly go to the wall, how about TwtQpon. Say it to yourself: TwtQpon.

WTF?

Hey ho, perhaps I should lighten up and rename this blog Doofkl.

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