Agenda Inc.'s Live Feed has a story about a woman who's changing her name to goldenpalace.com, after auctioning off the rights to her name on eBay. Now, before you go thinking that's gotta be the worst name ever, take a look at Snark Hunting this morning, where there's a note about the "Worst baby name ever." Poor kid.
Posted by
abnu on Thursday, March 31, 2005 @ 9:59 AM
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Have Wordlab fed to you: Wordlab now has an XML RSS feed you can plug into your favorite aggregator and have these ranting sucked right onto to your desktop.
Posted by
Jay on Wednesday, March 30, 2005 @ 1:55 PM
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Certainly, Johnnie's career will be noted as one marked by "celebrity" cases and clientele. But he and his family were most proud of the work he did on behalf of those in the community. As Johnnie always said, "an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." It was his rallying cry as he worked to right many wrongs, and as he provided a voice to those who needed to be heard. He was deeply committed to helping and inspiring others -- especially young people. His extraordinary law career will undoubtedly stand the test of time. But it was his devotion to his fellow human beings that will remain as his true legacy.
Johnnie Cochran was one very smart lawyer, and one of the few in his profession with a keen appreciation of naming and branding. At the height of his career, he leveraged the brand called Johnnie Cochran into a national law firm that, through a series of mergers, office expansions and regional partnerships, emerged in recent years to become "America's largest personal injury plaintiffs tort law firm", The Cochran Firm.
Personally, he didn't take himself too seriously, and would laugh along with comments about how his firm's website might be taking his iconic image just a bit too far. Last year, on another lawyer's blog, I joked about The Cochran Firm's new website design:
Nice job on the website, Jenna. "Do You Have A Case?" is a very user-friendly lead generator. I think that's really smart. I'm not so sure about the photos of the Evil Trial Lawyer and Mini Me on the home page, though. I guess the idea behind the two identical photos on the same page is to reinforce the Cochran brand--that all the partners are clones of Johnnie Cochran.
To which, one of Johnnie's associates replied with good-natured humor consistent with his brand:
The clone statement left me inhaling my coffee. I'm just grateful the mini-me's aren't ALL wearing the pimp suits. It's actually kind of funny. In his book, Johnnie talks about his "sense of fashion". He blames a jewish boy he went to school with.
Johnnie Cochran was one of a kind, a real character with real character, and he will be sadly missed.
Posted by
abnu on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 @ 9:14 PM
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Founded in 2000, Culture of Life is a non-profit project that helps young professionals connect with a wide variety of faith-based organizations and their events in New York. While it draws its principal inspiration from Catholic social teaching, Culture of Life welcomes participation by professionals of other religious traditions.
Arr! It's ahoy! C'mere me buxom beauty, and prepare to swab the poop deck ye filthy bilge rat! Korn star Jonathan Davis has been added to our list of celebrities who fancy ridiculous baby names. Davis and his wife, porn star Deven Davis, have named their son Pirate.
I'm a pirate! That I be! I sail me ship upon the sea! I stay up late - till half past three! And that's a peg below me knee!
Yo Ho, my friends I have a tale of treasure, plunder, sea and sail my story's bigger than a whale it gets so deep, ye'll have to bail.
Chorus I'm a pirate! That I be! I sail me ship upon the sea! I stay up late - till half past three! And that's a peg below me knee!
I like to fish, I like to fight I like to stay up half the night When I say "starboard" ye go right! Me ma, she says, "Ye look a fright!"
Chorus I'm a pirate! That I be! I sail me ship upon the sea! I stay up late - till half past three! And that's a peg below me knee!
I've got no hand but that's me hook! I pillage stuff but I'm no crook. Me booty's in this chest I took. They'll write about me in a book!
Chorus I'm a pirate! That I be! I sail me ship upon the sea! I stay up late - till half past three! And that's a peg below me knee!
And that's all there is to this song. I hope it hasn't been too long. A pirate's life might just be wrong So grow up nice and big and strong!
The new baby pirate has a full name—Pirate Howsmon Davis. Sadly, the boy's parents missed by a yardarm the opportunity to name him Pirate Howell Davis, so that, on the slim chance this kidd survives schoolyard mutinies and grows up not to be a mass murderer, a rock star, or a porn star, he might use the respectable moniker, P. Howell Davis, on his business cards and still have a good laugh and a grog with his mates.
Posted by
abnu on Monday, March 28, 2005 @ 12:04 AM
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From the real life trumps any attempt at humor department: Filed under Oddities
Pictured on the right is real, unaltered logo for the Arlington Pediatric Center. Hard to imagine what the thinking was, there. Well, it?s hard to imagine the thinking got successfully produced into a banner without a major freakout. Fark is having fun with it, that?s for sure:
?Because hey, they?re a convenient height.? ?It?s probably a discarded idea from when the local Catholic diocese had their logo designed.? ?That logo sucks.?
There seems to be no end to this branding recipe we call "just add name and *ster." Remember Napster, the music gangster? And Friendster? Now, there's Queryster; just what we need, another search engine.
Frankly, we don't care who you are. Your personality bores us, as does your pathetic attempts at conversation. Face it: it's not who are you, it's what you like. Call us materialistic (don't worry, it won't be the first time), but the label on your carefully distressed t-shirt matters. A lot. Hipsters aren't hip solely because they have a working knowledge of existentialist philosophy. Ennui takes work, dedication and a careful selection of equally troubled brands.
Face it, commercials are the new sitcoms, and billboards are the new newspapers. You cry during car commercials, and that Aflac duck makes you soil your Haines. For better or worse (we'll lean towards the latter), you're a brandster. Obsessed with iPods and Yurman, you've ditched your true self, opting instead for the best version Madison Avenue can create. Awesome.
Enquiring minds probably want to know what this *ster means, after all.
Star. Oldest form *2ster-. 1. Suffixed form *ster-s-. star, from Old English steorra, star, from Germanic *sterzn-. 2. Suffixed form *str-l-. stellar, stellate; constellation, from Latin stlla, star. 3. Basic form *ster-. aster, asteriated, asterisk, asterism, asteroid, astral, astro-; astraphobia, disaster, from Greek astr, star, with its derivative astron, star, and possible compound astrap, asterop, lightning, twinkling (< ?looking like a star?; ps, op-, eye, appearance; see okw-).
Hipster tipster to Queryster: enoughster alreadyster of this brandster shit.
Posted by
abnu on Saturday, March 26, 2005 @ 9:45 AM
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ShitBegone toilet paper is a quality product that exemplifies your attitude and approach to life, according to the company website.
ShitBegone is a joke but it is also a metaphor. The joke and the metaphor are both about transparency. Most people use toilet paper to wipe up shit, but most companies do not sell toilet paper by talking about shit. They sell it with the opposite of shit? bullshit. Fluffy bunnies and so on.
ShitBegone is about selling a product based on reality, when the competition is selling based on a made up image. In the case of shit that might be funny, but in the end it's no joke. Brands obscure the reality behind nearly everything we buy. When you buy a brand, do you know what you're really buying? What it's made of, how it's put together, who makes it? Usually not? because traditional brands are all about hiding that reality.
Because reading goes hand in hand with toilets, the company has a business blog—but it's really a piece of shit. The business blog is a good idea for ShitBegone, don't get me wrong, but they really should blog about good shit like this, instead of just about the company. They missed the opportunity to use a weblog template graphic that evokes images of the individual sheets of a toilet paper roll. And, they didn't even name the weblog "The Blog Roll" or anything clever.
Posted by
abnu on Thursday, March 24, 2005 @ 11:00 PM
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Baby Phat, the brand, is the marriage of high fashion and street style.
Baby Phat first came into existence as a publicity tool. Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons produced tiny tees with the clever name "Baby Phat" to electrify his men's Phat Farm runway shows. When celebrities and models such as Tyra Banks and Claudia Schiffer started wearing these tees, they became such a phenomenon that the decision was made to launch an entire Baby Phat collection.
In Europe, a new fashion line is addressing "old school" fat. Neckermann, a mail-order company, is eyeing the expanding children's market in Germany that's been called "XXL nation", offering a line of plus-size clothing that addresses the problem of ill-fitting clothing for overweight kids. According to company spokeswoman Alexandra Eichhorn, quoted in Deutsche Welle, Neckermann hopes its new line will help overweight kids who feel like outsiders or are teased by their peers to fit in better, at least when it comes to fashion.
Still, it's probably not phat to be fat, unless you're Missy Elliott.
Posted by
abnu on Wednesday, March 23, 2005 @ 11:45 PM
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The following post is from a web page that sucks because it is no longer active, but it has been salvaged from Google's cache and is presented here for posterity.
Posted by kingsley at September 23, 2003 02:30 PM
In the spirit of Vin Flanders' Web Pages That Suck, here's my list of bad domain name ideas so you can avoid these bloopers when picking a domain name.
1. Don't pick names with hyphens, dots or any other funny characters. "Blog-city" is a stupid domain. "Blog~City" is even stupider. People remember words as sounds, not as shapes. So when I tell someone to go check out a site, I say, "Go to blog city dot com". This registers in the listener's brain as "blogcity". "Dot com" is lost in assumption. One site I worked with had this huge problem - they would do a lot of advertising, and their competitor would get all the hits. Stupido! We partially fixed the problem by advicing the client to make sure that the dash was pronounced during the advertisement.
2. Don't use adjectives that might ever be used by the porn industry. "Hot" is so not hot. "Sexy", "big", "wild" are all adjectives you need to stay far away from. Also avoid references to race names like "Asian", "white", "black" or any kind of sexual preference like "gay", "straight" or "bi". Once your users mis-type your URL and land up at a porn site, they're going to take a long while to come back to you.
3. Don't use words that sound like other commonly used words. No "AcmeTooys" or "CrazyMuzic". People will hear it as "AcmeToys" and as "CrazyMusic" and remember it that way.
4. Avoid wacko domains. A dotcom is the best domain. If you are a business, its the only domain.
5. Stay off sub-domains. People who are not technically savvy don't get the concept. To them, any web address starts with "www" and ends with ".com". My dad still forgets the dots in URLs. He keeps typing "wwwgooglecom", because that's how he remembers it. I've seen the same problems with other people of his generation.
6. Make sure that the translation from pronunciation to spelling is unambiguous. For example, "Kings" is a better domain name than "Kingsley" because the latter can be misspelt very easily. I should know.
The distilled essence of these rules:
A domain name should not need followup instructions after X tells Y about it. Means that X should not have to say "Go to Blog-city.net. There's a dash between the blog and the city. And it's not .com, it's .net." Sucks rocks.
BJ Services Company derives the majority of its worldwide revenues from Pressure Pumping Services. Our mission is to become the number one Pressure Pumping Services company in the world by providing our customers with the most advanced products, services and technology in the business. BJ Services has highly skilled, dedicated personnel. Coupling our personnel with BJ's focused nature will enable us to fulfill our vision.
Bust-Up was one of the biggest hits at the Tokyo Health Fair, a huge event designed to cash in on the nation?s obsession with health and the willingness of Japanese to spend big money on products and gadgets that purport to keep them young and beautiful.
The double effect of an ageing society and the growing affluence of women in their twenties has created a supplement and health-improvement industry worth about £5 billion a year. One stand at the health fair offered the essence of a foul-smelling Polynesian gourd that supposedly has restorative effects on the hair. Tiny bottles sold for nearly £350.
Another company introduced a range of bar snacks coated with volcanic rock powder that, it was claimed, will cleanse your bowels and go nicely with a pint. There were plenty of variations on that theme, including Café Colon, a canned ice-coffee drink that claims to be the equal of a professionally administered enema.
This week, we're wankingGanker, I mean, ganking Gawker.
Celebrity Baby Time: Naming Baby Dashti
There may be a celebrity baby a-brewin? in the Kutchmoore?s womb, and we put it to our readers to come up with some serious baby name suggestions. Keeping in mind the potential spawn must have a name that is both appropriate for a celebrity seedling and respectful of Kabbalah?s mystic nuances, our readers have bravely answered the call of duty. Oblique, Tofutti, Profiterole, Habbakuk, Gary ? the responses were overwhelming and, dare we say, a bit touching. After the jump, a lengthy list of the best and most plausible picks for the little baby that could.
The runner-up was this skank wank, another Gawker Media classic, coining the expression "Visible Landing Strip" in a post on their evil sister site, Fleshbot.
Posted by
abnu on Sunday, March 20, 2005 @ 12:54 AM
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How sweet the sound, that saved a wench like me. Gitchie, gitchie, ya ya. Mocha Chocolata ya ya. Cue ol' Lady Mondegreen.
A mondegreen is a "slip of the ear" by which a phrase in a song is commonly misheard, such as "wench like me" instead of "wretch like me" in Amazing Grace.
The term for such a mishearance was coined by Sylvia Wright, apparently in a November 1954 Harper's Magazine article entitled "The Death of Lady Mondegreen." The word "mondegreen" is, itself, a mondegreen of "They hae slain the Earl o' Murray and laid him on the green", from a 17th Century ballad The Bonnie Earl O' Murray, the last five words being misheard as "Lady Mondegreen".
Amazing Graa-aaccee How Sweet- How sweet The sound- Sound That saved, saved A wrench Like Me I once was lost, lost yeah Lost But now Im found What you say girl? But Now, Im found we still cant feel you But Noooowww, Im found Was blind, but now I see Ooh, ooh, ooh, Ooh, ooh, ooh, Ooh, ooh, ooh, Ooh, ooh, ooh, T'was grace that taught my heart to fear And that my fears relieved How precious did that grace Appear The hour I first believed Thank you Lordy
There's a new web search engine that's all about people's name ranks, er, Preople.
Who is your global or virtual neighbor? In an age where egocasting, dynamic ranking and global awareness is abundant we present Preople.com. Preople.com will tell you, definitely and undeniable, what your place, your ranking and your relation to all the other people in the world is in one number: your Preople Ranking. Don't hesitate, don't wait, enter your name in the search field en press Preople. All your questions will be answered.
This is just one of many curious websites of special interest to Wordlabbers that can be found on J-Walk Blog from time to time. So, whenever it seems like your humble servant is slacking off around here, take a look at what John Walkenbach has discovered, and what his peeps have to say.
Posted by
abnu on Friday, March 18, 2005 @ 2:41 PM
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Some don't advertise at all. They're "too professional" they say. Others insist that, in order to be a successful professional these days, you have to run your practice like a business. Here's where it gets a bit fuzzy for most lawyers. They don't really know what business they're in.
Most lawyers think of the legal services they offer as the business. So, to them, running a law practise as a business means "selling" legal services, and advertising those services is a necessary evil—and necessarily evil. It's not surprising that lawyers who advertise their "services" often do a disservice to themselves, and the profession.
Believe it or not, most lawyers don't understand that the professional services business they're in is the business of the Trusted Advisor. Trust me, this book should be required reading for law students. It might be too late for lawyers.
We live in a world based on trust. Every day we are forced to trust strangers. We trust the school bus driver to get our children to school, the airline pilot to get us safely to our destinations, the hospital staff to administer the proper medication, the police officer to enforce the law, the other motorists not to drink and drive. Sometimes, though, we are let down. Lawyers are among those who can jeopardize trust, whether by not fully communicating the frailties of a case to the client or not being upfront about a fee. In any event, the lawyer becomes just another in a long line of those who do not follow through on a promise, and, with that betrayal of trust, however small, the entire profession suffers a bit.
Certainly lawyers are advocates for their clients, but, first and foremost, they are counselors. Maybe more than in any other profession, people turn to lawyers for their advice, their logic in seeing through a problem and perceiving issues, and their decision-making ability after examining all the options and likely consequences. Although consumers describe lawyers as greedy, manipulative, and corrupt, they also say that lawyers are educated, intelligent, knowledgeable, hard working, aggressive, outgoing, well spoken, and confident. These are traits they admire and even would like to emulate. It is on these virtues that those in need of legal services rely. On the basis of these strengths, each of us must formulate a plan to do our jobs better. We discussed and debated that very issue in the second part of the Town Hall Meeting April 25 in Faneuil Hall during the Annual Meeting.
Public confidence in our profession is critical in doing our jobs right. We must live up to that great responsibility, and how we handle it is what distinguishes us as true professionals. Lawyers must earn the right to be trusted once again.
This piece was written as a Guest Blogger's post for the entertainment of lawyers and law students on Evan Schaeffer'sNotes from the (Legal) Underground, a lawyer's weblog with a difference. It's not so stuffy.
Posted by
abnu on Wednesday, March 16, 2005 @ 4:37 AM
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Now, the winners are—drumroll—the envelope, please.
Dooce for Best American Weblog
Dooce for Best Writing of a Weblog
Dooce for Most Humorous Weblog
Dooce for Best Tagline of a Weblog
The winning tagline was "Not your average clenched-cheek sprint to the bathroom" so, you gotta be asking, "How do you pronounce DOOCE and where did that word come from?" Apparently, it's a frequently asked question.
I wish there were a more interesting story behind the name of this website, and I?ve tried for days to come up with something hipper than the truth, but the unhip truth is that the word DOOCE is a result of my horrible typing and spelling skills. I lived and worked in LA for four years, and people in LA like to say the word dude in casual conversation, in business meetings, and from the pulpit. Everyone in LA dudes. When I worked in an office and instant messaged coworkers, we were always typing ?dude, no way? and ?awesome, dude!? and then it sort of became ?right on, doode? and ?oh my god, doooooooode.? But I could never type it right. I was always typing ?duce? and ?dooce? and half of a thirty minute IM conversation was dominated by me correcting the misspelling, like, ?oops, i meant dooce? and even in the corrections I couldn?t type it right. So they all started calling me Dooce. The Dooce. Her Dooceness. Wrapped up like a Dooce!
Dooce is pronounced like DEUCE, not like douche or like doo-chay or dookie. Please don?t call me dookie, because seriously, given my personal bowel history, that would be entirely inaccurate.
This year's Bloggies were blinded by the light, wrapped up by the dooce, another blogger in the night.
Posted by
abnu on Monday, March 14, 2005 @ 2:07 PM
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A pet photographer with a punny name, PhoDOGraphy.com, extends the brand with the tagline "fetching pet portraits" and grabs attention with an edgy slogan — "We Shoot Dogs".
Considering Igor's Theory of Negativity, do you think the slogan is a good one for a pet photographer? And, overall, how would you rate this naming and branding using Igor's Name Evaluation guidelines?
Last week, Wordlab ganked a post from Beyond Northern Iraq that raises an important question concerning the need for the American government to articulate US policy in the Middle East in the Arabic language. This week, we've taken a very small but informative post from Arts & Letters Daily, which illustrates the huge communication challenges facing western forces on the ground in Iraq.
Don?t leave home without it! The Pentagon?s Iraq Culture Smart Card helps you to dine with locals, arrest them, etc... small pdf ... very big pdf
These interesting pdf files are provided by the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, MCIA, and are available from the website of FAS, the Federation of American Scientists.
Our founders were members of the Manhattan Project, creators of the atom bomb and deeply concerned about the implications of its use for the future of humankind. FAS is the oldest organization dedicated to ending the worldwide arms race and avoiding the use of nuclear weapons for any purpose.
Coincidentally, FAS is creating an interactive learning game for young people called Discover Babylon.
Posted by
abnu on Sunday, March 13, 2005 @ 7:02 AM
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Before looking at the photos from the book by Guy Swillingham about the naming and branding of retail shops in the United Kingdom, please take a moment to read this excerpt from the book's introduction:
There is a menace lurking in the streets of Britain. It is not drugs. It is not crime. It is not loitering teen gangs. It is something far more threatening. Something that offends the decency of right-thinking people. Innocently going about their business, they are suddenly confronted by this horror. They stand petrified, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
That menace is the shop with a pun-based name.
These attempts at store-front comedy lie scattered the length and breadth of this country. Their abuse of humour and language cause stomach-churning, cringe-inducing reactions whenever encountered.
There is much talk of cleaning up our streets. Shop Horror had had enough of talk. It was time to act. We scoured the land, rounding up the offending establishments to hold them up as a lesson to all.
Then something happened.
We realised that there comes a point when things get so bad, they're actually good. These were not just the UK's worst pun-based shop names. They were also the best. We knew then it was time to celebrate, not castigate, these wonderfully terrible stores by presenting them here.
One of this rogues gallery of shop names really got our attention because, outside of New York City and maybe Chicago, we wouldn't expect to see a pizzeria name that combines a family restaurant concept and a Sopranos-style "collection" business in such a compelling brand.
Posted by
abnu on Saturday, March 12, 2005 @ 12:09 AM
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The South African Geographic Names Council is expected to approve the change of the name of Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, to Tshwane later this year, beginning the process of changing the city's name on maps and other official documents. An international marketing campaign would then be started to make people aware of the new name, according to a report this week by BBC News.
Pretoria was named after Andries Pretorius, a folk hero of the Afrikaner group, which set up apartheid.
Tshwane, which means "We are the same", is the name given to the area by early African groups.
No doubt, the campaign for the rebranding of Pretoria will have the usual objective to differentiate the city from other tourist and economic capitals around the world—with the tagline "We Are The Same Only Different."
Posted by
abnu on Friday, March 11, 2005 @ 7:22 AM
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Before the new car show season was in full gear, the naming and branding experts with the Snark Hunting blog noticed that automobile marketers seem to be looking to the Italians for new car names.
So, it might come as no surprise that the editors of our favorite auto blog, Jalopnik, have news from the Geneva Motor Show that the Bizzarrini marque is making a comeback. In the land of Ferrari and Lamborghini, wherever did they get such a bizarre name for a car? From the legendary carmaker, Giotto Bizzarrini, of course.
Posted by
abnu on Thursday, March 10, 2005 @ 9:55 PM
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You don't have to be New England Patriots rookie defensive back Randall Gay to have the name on an official replica NFL jersey, after the National Football League's "naughty words" filter was outed recently by Outsports.
The league?s response is a quick change from just a day earlier when a gay man named Barry Gay had a request for a jersey with his last name rejected. He received a rather insulting response when he complained that said (italics mine): "In the few cases that may arise with someone abusing certain words or names the NFL does not wish to be associated with any derogatory use of language or words. Unfortunately there is no way around this issue."
I wonder if the NFL would take the position that it is offensive to have "tight end" on an NFL jersey.
Ben Gay played for the Cleveland Browns in 2001. And, BENGAY ointment for the temporary relief of minor aches and pains of muscles and joints associated with simple backache, arthritis, strains, bruises, and sprains, is okay with the NFL. Boy Butter, not so much.
But homophonia is not just in sports. Singer and songwriter, Marvin Gaye was originally Gay.
Posted by
abnu on Wednesday, March 09, 2005 @ 10:53 PM
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Customer relationship management gurus Peppers & Rogers Group's newsletter, Inside 1to1, this week brings us news of the Taxi Cab Evolution.
Even the mundane task of riding in a taxi cab is evolving to meet customers' needs. In the U.K., satellite technology is in use to connect would-be passengers with the cab driver closest to where they're standing. Zingo taxi company uses GPS and location-based technology that pinpoints a customer's location and routes the call directly to the nearest driver. The driver can explain how long it will take to get to that exact location, and a one-to-one communication is enabled, rather than a call into general dispatch.
And in February, Internet-equipped cabs from Interactive Taxicab debuted in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, with a planned roll out to taxicab mecca New York later this year. Passengers can access real-time news, weather, and sports, as well as book reservations, buy movie tickets, and pay their cab fare from the back seat.
Meanwhile, in Canada, Taxi Advertising is another thing altogether, having nothing whatsoever to do with taxis—or does it? Is the name getting in the road?
Posted by
abnu on Monday, March 07, 2005 @ 10:00 AM
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Once a week, Wordlab features a post from a blog we like that is just the sort of thing that ought to have been written by us, if only we had thought of it first.
This week, we're ganking a post from a professional journalist, Stuart Hughes, who has blogged from Northern Iraq and beyond. Stu's a Brit, so he might not know what gank means, but I'm sure he won't mind too much if we nick, feck, jack or otherwise TWOC this from his blog:
There are signs everywhere at the moment of the seemingly unstoppable rise of Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera has been named as one of the most influential brands in the world -- up alongside Apple, Google, Ikea and Starbucks.
And this week's Economist devotes several pages to analysing the Al Jazeera phenomenon.
With Al Jazeera playing such a pivotal role in shaping Middle Eastern opinion and influencing millions of hearts and minds across the region, then, it seems scarcely believable that the American government still has no permanent, camera-trained spokesman able to articulate US policy in Arabic.
This post was lifted from Beyond Northern Iraq, which is only 14th on the British Blogs Top Ten, so give a click to bolster that ranking, and to let Stuart Hughes know he's been ganked real good.
Posted by
abnu on Sunday, March 06, 2005 @ 11:25 AM
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Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed the Big Apple's first chief marketing officer, New York City has been taking a very commercial approach to the city's brand development initiatives.
Now, preparing its pitch for the Summer Olympics in 2012, New York City is seeking to trademark the phrase, "The World's Second Home." What can ya say about this new slogan that would be, well, right to the point and funnier than cantankerous commentator Lewis Black's "I Loves New York" rant from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
In other news, a North Carolina clothing designer named Michael Stewart (no relation to Jon Stewart) is in litigation with the state of New York over T-shirts he designed with an "I [heart symbol] NC" logo. Apparently, that logo is one of several that have come under fire from the New York State Department of Economic Development, which routinely sues to protect its most famous slogan from commercial interlopers including I [heart symbol] Yoga and tourism slogans such as I [heart symbol] San Francisco—not to be confused with I Left My [heart symbol] in San Francisco.
Posted by
abnu on Friday, March 04, 2005 @ 12:12 AM
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BTKTOKAKETVANDWPD: It has been reported by news media that the serial killer delivered "a bizarre word game" to a local television station on May 5, 2004. It's the hottest game in town, apparently, and tv viewers are calling the station with guesses and more clues now that the word game is posted on the web along with a video explaining how to solve such a puzzle in less than a year.
The killer's Word Search Puzzle might have provided police investigators with clues to his identity almost a year ago, including his name and home address, but the pieces of the puzzle seemed to really come together when the killer provided the rest of the "chapters" to his story in the past few months, along with a floppy disk that still had trace information from erased files.
Do you think the killer could've used an online program like this to create his word puzzle from a list of keywords, leaving an activity record on web servers? Somebody's probably looking into that.
Posted by
abnu on Thursday, March 03, 2005 @ 12:11 AM
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In this morning's Globe and Mail there's an entertaining book review of From Altoids to Zima by the Word Detective, Evan Morris.
The book is a trivia lover's delight, but it also shows the serendipitous ways in which many top brand names and their associated images have come into our lives, a counterpoint to the more deliberate approach of today, with naming specialists too often concocting unappealing, synthetic monikers.
The review excerpts anecdotes about famous brands, including a story about a tagline that was created by a President of the United States and another about a product named by the King of England.
In additon, the reviewer mentions How Brands Become Icons in which Oxford University professor Douglas Holt looks at the cultural factors that have led products like Snapple, Budweiser, Mountain Dew and Harley-Davidson to become icons.
Posted by
abnu on Wednesday, March 02, 2005 @ 8:32 AM
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Note the cool Fine Print: The content found on WordLab
is free to the world. Although we cannot guarantee that any of this
content is not already in use by someone, somewhere, on this planet
who may have seen it on this Web site or created it independently of
our Web site, we have made a reasonable effort to give you what we believe
to be original names and slogans and generally good stuff. Use what
you will of our content since it is here for the taking. However, if
you decide to use one of our names for a commercial activity, and since
we have no assurance that the name may not already be in use by someone
else as a trademark, domain name or otherwise, we strongly suggest that
you take appropriate legal precautions, such as seeing a lawyer. In
short, any necessary due diligence is up to you, but we at least make
no claims on your potential future dream name. We merely ask that if
you do decide to use any of our content, that you please send us an
email ["word at wordlab dot com"] about it for use in our
internal records and eplosive marketing campaigns. Thank you, and enjoy.
ShitBegone is a joke but it is also a metaphor. The joke and the metaphor are both about transparency. Most people use toilet paper to wipe up shit, but most companies do not sell toilet paper by talking about shit. They sell it with the opposite of shit? bullshit. Fluffy bunnies and so on.
