Trumblog

Great article today from Paul Farhi at the Washington Post, How Do You Tell a Web Name From A Typo?

Many grown-ups now sound like babbling toddlers when speaking about the digital world — because many corporate names now have the ring of a collection of Dr. Seuss characters.

Websites, companies and projects name checked in the article include Bebo, Joost, Flickr, Hulu, Revver, Fandango, Kazaa, Fark, Zug, Yelp, Woozyfly, Zune, Miva, Google, Yahoo, Revver, Apahcinc, Tucows, Babooshnik, Furl, Spurl, Skaffe, Sporge, Qumana, Qoosa, TagTooga, Tendango, Ooma, BooRah, Xobni, Meebo, Squidoo, Yoomba, Oodle, Renkoo and Wakoopa.

I particularly like the historical reference to mergers from the last century that lead to names that may have been odd at the time, but are now familiar.

Grand old corporate names got shortened to sound jazzier — the National Biscuit Co. became Nabisco — and eventually some became just a series of initials. American Telephone & Telegraph became AT&T. International Business Machine became simply IBM. And British Petroleum — two words freighted with history and baggage — became BP.

Everything old is new again.