Away With Words: Web/Tech

Do the names Cello, Viola, and Slipknot ring any bells?
How about Gopher, Lynx, and Amaya?
They're all nomenclature ghosts from the Internet's monochromatic Stone Age, and the vanished worlds they represent are lovingly preserved at , dedicated to the web as we remember it.

Visit the browser emulator to experience virtual history via Internet Explorer 2.0 (1996) or Netscape Navigator 1.0 (circa 1995).

(A disclaimer warns, Sorry, due to heavy load on the , browsing is quite slow. On the positive side, it makes the experience even more authentic. )
Or travel memory lane via a clever timeline ( In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was ascii encoded.

.. ).

DejaVu.org is the brainchild of Pär Lannerö of in Stockholm, who charmingly informs us that the Swedish equivalent of déjà vu ( already seen in French) translates to feel again you.
For more browser nostalgia, in a far geekier format, visit .

It's a trove of defunct or moribund names, including 1X, Net-Tamer, AtomNet, Charlie, SurfMonkey, Minuet, Pythia, and the romantic and impoverished Bohemian Net Browser.
I mentioned , a search engine that makes ingenious use of the Austrian country-code suffix, .at, instead of using the far more common .

com. I've been looking into this newish naming convention for a while now, thinking it could interest some of my clients who've been frustrated by the difficulties of securing a clean .com domain.

Here are some of my findings.
The current trend for making real-word domains that incorporate country codes may have begun with , the social bookmarking site that allows users to store bookmarked websites online, tag them with keywords, and access them from any computer. (At least I don't know of an earlier example.

By the way, Del.icio.us is free; I use it all the time and can't remember how I managed without it.

) Del.icio.us uses the United States country code to great effect, although personally I have trouble remembering where to put that second period--I want to spell it Deli.

cio.us. Del.

icio.us went online in late 2003 and was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005. Long may it wave.

Much more recently--just a few weeks ago--I discovered , the first instance I've found of the India country code being appropriated to create an English-language idiom. Outside.in, which is based in Brooklyn, aggregates hyperlocal journalism --stories about neighborhoods and communities around the U.

S. (with plans for international expansion). More than 3,000 neighborhoods are currently tracked.

As daily newspaper readership declines, services like Outside.in may represent the future of journalism. I'm keeping an eye on it.

But .at, .us, and .

in are just the beginning. Here are some other overseas sites that are in fact all-American:

(Italy), still in pre-launch, seems to have something to do with VoIP or group messaging or ..

. something

I also know of two bloggers, husband and wife and Canter (he's the CEO of ), who use the .it domain very cleverly.

There's lots of room for creativity in this area. Consider these underused country domains:

• .ky (Cayman Islands).

  How about Quir.ky or Luc.ky or Stic.

  ky?

• .ve (Venezuela).

  Lots of English words end in -ve: Substanti.ve, Illustrati.ve, LiveAndLetLi.

  ve.

• .pa (Panama).

  A site for tuba aficionados called OomPa.pa?

But wait, you protest--isn't this a form of cyber-colonialism?

Actually, it's more like cyber-tourism or specialty stamp collecting--it creates a nice revenue stream for smaller countries. The tiny Polynesian nation of Tuvalu--too remote for all but the most determined tourists--was among the first to cash in with the very popular .tv domain, which it registered in 2000.

Will Luxembourg (.lu) or Belarus (.by) be next?


For a directory of country domains, .
Image: the . According to it, Malaysians (country code .

my) are the happiest people in Asia and the seventeenth-happiest people in the world.


One of my favorite bloggers, the linguist known as The Name Inspector, has posted organized by linguistic category. His taxonomy is a bit fluid; under Real Words, for example, he includes some words whose reality is open to debate, like (not in most dictionaries; most likely an onomatopoeic coinage) and (from grok, to understand intuitively, coined by Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land).

The Name Inspector's Foreign Words include an old English word, , to soften or make supple, according to the site's About page (old English is foreign?), but I'm guessing the idea of soup, and maybe people, had something to do with the coinage, and the supple thing was a back-definition. See, for example, a competitor site, , which defines itself as Yahoo!

+ Google Made by the People --and I don't doubt that you, , plays into it as well. Not that any of this is bad; the more meaning you can pack into a short company name, the better.
One more note: The Name Inspector doesn't include my own favorite search engine, , a blend of and bingo --and probably Google, too, since that's what powers it.

Blingo turns search into a game; every time you submit a search you're eligible for a prize. (This is by no means an endorsement, but I've won a couple of movie tickets this way. Yes, you have to surrender personal data to be eligible.

As eight years ago, You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it. )
But enough nitpicking.

The lists are fascinating for their creativity and diversity--who knew there were so many search engines out there?--and The Name Inspector is to be congratulated for doing a on them. Some of the new-to-me names I found ingenious and appealing:


• (coined from adjacent keyboard letters)
• (that's .

  at as in the Austria country code. I have a post in the works about creative uses of country codes; stay tuned.)

*Update: According to a comment from the company's chief operating officer on , Hakia isn't Finnish for anything; it's a pure coinage.


I first heard about a couple of years ago, from an early adopter so starry-eyed over the whole imaginary online alternate reality thing that I thought she'd joined a cult. When--without asking permission--she began sending me multiple emails with gargantuan attachments ( Here's my avatar! ), I worried for her sanity (and my server).

Since then, Second Life has become a bizarre mega-phenomenon attracting more than three million players--whoops, they don't think it's a game!--and corporate sponsors who set up shop and charge real money for fictional products and services. And Avatar Gal has folded her consulting tent and gone to work full time for , creator of Second Life.

May she second-live long and prosper.
You can see where I come down on all this. One life is more than enough for me, thanks very much.

And also for , the Vancouver, BC, technologist and writer behind , a one-page satire of Second Life. Get a First Life is a 3D analog world where server lag does not exist and where you're invited to fornicate using your actual genitals.
Great concept.

Might just catch on.
Diane at has researched several self-described Web 2.0 name generators that automate the process of naming your company.

Sure, they're free, but do they work? I'm fascinated by generators and curious about what constitutes a Web 2.0 name, so I rolled the dice myself.


The results on and --well, my results, anyway--were far too random and nonsensical to be practical.
simply displays a list of names (hit refresh to see a new list), some of which turn out to have available domains. I like the way this generator goes beyond random letter assemblage to combine phonemes, words, and numbers in more or less credible ways (that is, if True64 or StyleTriangles represent credibility where you live).


My favorite generator is , which presents only one surprisingly plausible name at a time and allows you to link to Dotster to check its availability. It took me only four attempts to find an available name (Quinyx.com), but it would take me a whole lot longer to backform a company, a product, and a story to accompany it.

My next attempt, Rhymbo, also is available--right this minute, anyway--and kinda catchy, I think. (A commando poet?)
Although I make my living developing names for companies and products, I don't discount automated naming programs: they're fun, they're clever, and, if nothing else, they get your creative juices flowing.

Some generators, like Benjamin's, force you to think about the key words and concepts behind your business--always a good idea when you're embarking on a naming exercise. And most of them prove that name development is a daunting business in which there's no good substitute for human intelligence.