Night now!
Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or
stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters
of. Night!
~James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p.216 lines 2-5

Making the transition from trying to name a company, product or service yourself and hiring an agency such as Zinzin to do it can be a daunting task. Whether the pressure comes from budget, timing, uncertainty or other factors, there are many reasons why companies put off this decision until the last minute, until panic sets in, adding a new source of pressure than can cloud judgement. In order to feel more confident with your selection of a naming company, regardless of who you ultimately hire to do the job, here are Zinzin’s Ten Criteria For Selecting A Naming Agency:

1. Check out the agency’s portfolio. Have they created any great names, or any names at all? Do they demonstrate the ability to create a range of names, or a narrow niche? Do any of the names resonate with you? Have you ever heard of any of the names in the portfolio? Do any make you smile, and do any make you cringe? Take your time to really understand your feelings about a naming company’s portfolio. (Zinzin’s portfolio)
2. Does the agency have a well-developed process for creating names? (Zinzin’s process)
3. Is the naming company’s process for creating names public and easy to understand, or is it missing in action, hidden behind a proprietary TM-branded “black box,” or riddled with alienating biz-speak and obfuscating consultant diagrams?
4. Is their naming process interactive, demanding your involvement throughout, or do they just go away for a month or two, return with 5 names and say, “pick one”?
5. Does the agency have a clear philosophy of naming? Do you get the sense that they are passionate about naming? That they fully understand all aspects of the naming process and can communicate that clearly when you speak with them? (Zinzin’s Manifesto)
6. Does the agency have a blog and a presence in social media? If so, are they active? Do they have anything interesting to say? Do they have strong opinions that they are not afraid to share? Do they engage in conversations, or is it mostly just one-way marketing chatter that’s all about them and how awesome they are? (Zinzin’s blog, and on Twitter)
7. Can you get an agency principal on the phone or in email to discuss your project, or are you routed to “account rep” intermediaries? Are they helpful, and do you get a sense that they actively listen to you and understand your concerns? (Zinzin’s principals and contact information)
8. Are the naming agency principals industry thought leaders, or followers? Do you get the feeling from studying an agency’s website and speaking with them that they are pretty much interchangeable with other naming companies, or that they stand apart?
9. Do you get the sense that working with this agency will be a creative joy, a waste of your time, or even downright drudgery? When was the last time you enjoyed naming? Naming your company, product or service is about much more than just creating an identity — it’s about creating a lasting brand, and to do that right you need to thoroughly understand your brand positioning. And figuring this out should be fun, because it is like having an epiphany and then codifying it into every fiber of your brand. Self-knowledge is very powerful, for corporations no less than for individuals. Watch the Steve Jobs video, below, for a great illustration of this process, and note his shout-out to the ad agency, Chiat\Day (now TBWA\Chiat\Day), which helped him and Apple figure this out.
10. Has the agency, with their own name, gone above and beyond being a generic commodity? Is their own name any good? (Surprisingly, many naming companies have generic names that cause them to be indistinguishable from each other, defeating the most important purpose of naming. Go figure.) Do they have a story to tell? (About Zinzin’s name)

Steve Jobs on understanding the essence of a brand

“Apple at the core, it’s core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”

Get engaged

What is the essence, the core value, of your brand? What is the core value of any company you hire, for naming, graphic identity, or advertising? It is no longer enough for brands just to shout messages for “consumers” to digest — brands, companies must be engaged with their audience, society in general, and the world we all live in. So before you engage an agency to position you in the global village, make sure they understand the fundamental shift in how business is done that is going on right now, or they might just build you a glossy new pedestal to display your vision in a museum of dead brands.

And a poignant Leap Day Carol:

Remember: what happens on Leap Day, stays on Leap Day (at least for the next four years).

These go to eleven!

At Zinzin, we believe that creating powerful names is both a science, for which we have a rigorous, battle-tested process, and an art, for it is the art and poetry of great names that separate brands from their uninspired competition. Great names become brands that foster emotional engagement with their audience, and these are the names we are passionate about.

The Zinzin website has many features to help you get a handle on the naming process, including the Naming Guide and Manifesto PDFs available for free download.

Wordlab will continue to be a great free naming and branding resource for people and small companies who can’t afford to hire a naming firm. For companies in need of professional naming and branding services, Zinzin is here for you.

Join the conversation on Twitter by following @ZinzinLive.

In Canada people welcome trick-or-treators by placing pumpkins called jack-o’-lanterns in their windows.
Also in Canada it is bad luck for a black cat to cross your path, enter your home, or even enter your ship.

In Canada people give trick-or-treaters sweets to make sure they are not played a trick on.

Children make Jack-o’-lanterns for hallowe’en.

Dressing up as witches, ghosts and beasts for trick-or-treating is done also.

I know, I know, it sounds like Jabberwocky to us readers in the USofA, and seems to make no sense whatsoever. You’ll just have to trust my sources that in Canada it’s all perfectly logical.

So, a Happy Halloween to you then, eh?

BONUS MATERIAL: As an extra quasi-holiday featurette, I’ve created the following poem, “Canadian Halloween”, from the 69 words quoted above, put into random order using a random number generator:

CANOLA INHALED ANEW
enter witches
they sweets path a In trick-or-treaters trick
as make is people enter make
by your is called Canada

pumpkins people
cat luck and jack-o’-lanterns black
not home your it done in your for hallowe’en
Jack-o’-lanterns Canada
even their for your to Children in played

In Also or on also
placing sure ship up are Dressing welcome
give to a bad beasts
Canada trick-or-treators
ghosts windows cross for

Stained, glaucous, glycerine, gold, goat, clover
gold, local, stocks, type, food, wild, national, lake, flag,
valve, gyroscope, sect
heat, helium, lead, bare, state, invention, medieval
refraction, faction, ultra-action,
hunter, interest, bullet, market…

Loads, liquids, neon, heater, jaws, jungle
mains, signal, knives, kitchen
ingot, lovely, mirror, mold
Mycenaean, moat, poppy, rubber,
radar, rags, sugar, teak
silver, poke, tin, beetroot,
carrot, ebony, fruit, copper, silk…

Carpet, distant, pigmy, hid, pack,
timber, pudding, straw
raindrops, spattering, ramps
chameleon, prairie, pods, trigger
museum, scales, square, ultra, out of map, vent
volcano, vain, wreck, tactic
tidal, arches, valley, hand
inflect, impression, loom, last, molten
you gamma, meeting
lighting, signal, island, coral-cold

ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the non-profit, global coordinator of the Internet’s naming system. ICANN’s global Internet regulators met today in Singapore to “finalize rules for a major expansion of ‘generic top-level domains,’ that will clear the way for new offerings like .law, .coke or .nyc. Sites with those endings are expected to start rolling out late next year.” CNN.com tells the story in Forget .com, here’s .coke:

“Today’s decision will usher in a new Internet age,” said Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN’s Board of Directors. “We have provided a platform for the next generation of creativity and inspiration.”

Now, before you get all excited and start dreaming of registering “.wordlab” or “.snark” domain names, note the “gotcha”:

Crawford thinks dot-brand sites will be a hit with major companies. In addition to marketing benefits, they could help on the security front: HSBC, for example, could tell customers that a purported HSBC site isn’t legitimate unless it ends in .hsbc. And a company like Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) could market products at cellphones.verizon and store locations at losangeles.verizon.

But these benefits don’t come cheaply — or easily. ICANN charges at $185,000 per domain application, which Crawford says typically must include about 150 pages of policy documents.

Technical setup takes another $100,000 or so, he says, and upkeep can cost an additional $100,000 each year.

So there you have it — only “major companies” who can afford the cost and regulatory overhead will be able to buy into this, and the result will likely be more brand clutter and confusion, with new domains like .coke, .pepsi, .verizon, .hsbc flooding the Internet with millions more corporate websites. No longer would users just go to coke.com to find out — wait, why do users go there? — whatever they need to find out, but potentially there might be thousands of separate .coke sites. Any large company could basically build its own Internet now — imagine a self-contained, Chromewashed .google empire. And forget about just one “iCloud” for Apple — they could create a mega-cloud of .apple websites.

In addition to companies, non-profits, NGO’s, citizen groups, artists and any sort of non-corporate entity that can raise the funds could also create its own self-contained micro-Internet. Imagine legions of fans registering .gaga, .bieber, .kanye or .diddy domains for their fanblogs, with all that registration money going directly to the artists instead of GoDaddy. That is, if there’s anyone left who wants to have their own website, when a Facebook page is probably all they need. We’ll see.

It’s enough to make your head spin. And in the not-too-distant future, people will misplace websites and domains the way they misplace car keys. Honey, where did you park my files? Was it at cloud.apple, icloud.apple, app.apple, cloudapp.apple, cumulus-cloud.apple, docs.google, mydocs.google or vault.amazon?

Of course, there will be apps to help you remember where you put your digital life. Oh-yes-there-will-be.apps.

I just tested it for my own team name, and here are some of the beauties I came away with:

North Stucco Stumblers
Lucky Chillers
Hopping Steel Chameleons
Headless Turf Monkeys
Stealth Hillbillies
Macho Fire Strikers
Gritty Metal Aftermath
Bouncing Chemical Wheelers
Tri-City Green Wasps
Phat Vampires
Irrational Space Zealots
Pastel Beige Miltons
Hot Desert Crawlers
Tripping Silverbacks
Grunting Day Rats
Tainted City Burnouts
Giant Marsh Groundhogs
Hard Red Prawns
The Chemical Beancounters
Random Surf Rappers
The Champagne Patsies
Noble Longhairs
Limping Bush Hackers

If you need help with a specific team naming project and the Team Name Generator isn’t quite working out for you, sign up for a free Wordlab membership and post a New Topic to the Sports Team Names group Forum, and members of the Wordlab community will jump in and help you beat your arch rivals to a better team name. And see all the other name generators on our Name Generators page.

Really James, Estuarial Years didn’t merit a strike-through? The Tortoise must have liked it…

Salter might have benefited from the input of Wordlabbers if only he’d traveled a few decades into the future and posted a new Topic in our Publications Forum.

Attention authors: give Wordlab a try for novel titles, non-fiction book titles, short story titles, and even character names. (Via The Paris Review via Flavorpill)

Orthogonal Freq

Systems and methods
systems and methods
what is the frequency of
systems and methods
when your orthogonal embodiment is in division
and you feel your modem go cold

De-modulate!

A true multi-carrier uprising
receiving symbols from the plurality
the spectrally overlapping modulations
signals coupled to the transmitter
processors controlling data controlling processors
Fourier on all fours with his symbols

Payload data!

If I ever get out of this orthogonal overlap
buy me a drink and give me a slap.

Today, 90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words. You can change all that. Help Save the Words!

Let the school election campaign season begin!

The numbered list in general is one of the most overused  marketing clichés (just look at any magazine cover), and for some reason 101 is especially popular. Did it get started with 101 Dalmatians? Can “101″ still be such a magic number to capture the consumer’s attention if everything has been turned into a “101 Things” list?

I’m working on my own list: 100,001 really smart business decisions. I’ve got the first one (“Make a Big List”), but I’m stuck coming up with the other 100k. Perhaps Wordlabers can offer suggestions here in the comments.