Alvey : Names, names and more names

I watched a couple of our rocking TV Squad bloggers interview Zach Braff and Sarah Chalke on the set of Scrubs and when Joel Keller told Sarah that he's from TV Squad, I got a little chill. That's my name. I came up with "TV Squad". How cool is that?

And that got me thinking -- complete with a J.D.-style voiceover -- about some of the companies and brands I've named over the years:

Weblogs, Inc.
Blogsmith
An Event Apart, the conference series for A List Apart
TV Squad and the squads it spawned (Card Squad, Download Squad)
Meet The Makers, my 2002 event series
Blogstakes, a 2003 blog marketing contest site
The Brian Alvey Weblog
Blog Jovi, our hard rocking private dev blog
That's Fit, as in "All the news that's fit"
StyleDash
Frankensite, my web design resource for mad scientists -- conceived in 1996, it was going to be a WebMonkey-killer, but Lycos took that honor instead
Tech Engine
Blog Maverick

and the ones I didn't name:

Autoblog, someone else owned that and Jason bought it for $400
Gadling, Jason and his old English dictionary
Cinematical and Luxist, also Jason -- two of his best
Divester, Droxy, BBHub, PVR Wire and many of our other retired blogs, Jason
Engadget, Peter Rojas -- I came up with "Gear Eye", but he and Jason shot it down. Go figure!
Joystiq, also Peter -- Joystiq is Joystick+I.Q., but we don't mention that anywhere
Netscape, that name existed long before we got to AOL, many of you kids might not know that

I'm still trying to get the Emurse guys to switch to "C.V. Wonder". I'm telling you, I know what I'm doing here!

I have at least one more name I came up with that I really love, but I'll have to tell you about it later. I have to catch my flight to SxSW and I'd hate for my Blogsmith team to have another CodeJam without me.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this I've added more:

ComicMix and the "We've got issues" tagline
Crowd Fusion and the "It serves you right" tagline
Obsessable, an adjective for gadget obsessions
Super Eco and the "This planet means the world to us" tagline

Comments (4)

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Eliot 1275 days ago

Wait. The devs are here in this Austin place I just arrived in? I'm at the Embassy Suites downtown. I hope to see you soon.

Brian Alvey 1266 days ago

On many of the names like StyleDash, that was definitely the case. Jason would have a name that was near the end zone and I'd take it in for the score. ;-)

Slashfood was another one where I couldn't remember who came up with the name. Judith checked her archives and it was one of our lead bloggers. I could have sworn it was me.

Then I was thinking that at least I did the logo, but that was Mike. My contribution was finding the stock art sliced apple photo.

Fun fun fun.

victor Agreda Jr 1266 days ago

I seem to remember having a small hand in naming StyleDash... Yeah, just checked gmail archives-- I suggested Stylash, which you logically morphed into StyleDash.

However, I always marvel at your creativity with names. This from a guy who used to revel in making names for film/tv/book projects. Shakespeare was wrong-- names are very important. At least on the web!

Peter Rojas 1274 days ago

Hey, I always thought that "GearEye" would have been a really good name for Autoblog!

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