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
- 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 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.








Comments (4)
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Eliot 1105 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.
Peter Rojas 1104 days ago
Hey, I always thought that "GearEye" would have been a really good name for Autoblog!
victor Agreda Jr 1096 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!
Brian Alvey 1096 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.