A common language
Madman Elliot Back has beautifully quantified the words that most commonly appear in the names of blogs:
Wondering how people name their blogs is an old question, never answered to my satisfaction. Fortunately the Blogwise directory hosts a list of 33810 blogs. Extracting the names of each blog from the directory itself took some work, but the result is this text file of blog names, one per line. Now that I got the raw data, it’s time to go to work.
Quickly coding a solution in C#, I wrote a program to tokenize the blog names by whitespace and punctuation, and place the resulting words in a hashmap for counting purposes. This gives a tab-delimited (paste into Excel!) text file of words used in blog titles and their frequency…
…The top word, used in 9.986 percent of the blogs surveyed was “blog.” The next most popular, at 2.619 percent, is “life.” Here’s the top 10 words in a blog’s name:
1. blog - 9.986%
2. life - 2.619%
3. weblog - 1.841%
4. world - 1.296%
5. from - 1.226%
6. journal - 1.139%
7. news - 1.087%
8. thoughts - 1.039%
9. with - 0.670%
10. daily - 0.660%
Elliot goes much deeper into the mire here. It’s no surprise that most blog names are intuitively descriptive, for that is the norm across all product, service and company names. The result is a manky swirl of achromatic Gesso.
The key to powerful naming is finding the metaphor less traveled.
[ More posts about naming products | More posts about naming companies ]
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Its just great to know. I didn’t notice this thing earlier but mine is also named blog.
Comment by charles 01.07.06 @ 5:16 am