Starting a Blog — Naming It

Yesterday, I started “Impolite Company” to write about political issues. This and the next few posts will document the decisions I made and the steps I took in creating Impolite Company.

First on the list is the name: Impolite Company. I wasn’t looking for anonymity. I just needed another blog to segregate my political posts from everything else. I decided to use politics.blogan.net and went as far as creating the subdomain, installing the WordPress files, creating the database, and starting on the theme before I realized something better was needed, that I wanted a new domain name.

Here are factors I considered in choosing ImpoliteCompany.com:¹

• I wanted a “dot com” domain. That’s what people expect. When I say “blogan dot net” people look confused and disappointed. “Dot net?” they ask. I suspect they probably forget and go to the wrong site. Getting a dot com domain name was non-negotiable.
• I wanted the domain name to be common words spelled correctly — no web 2.0 spelling with missing vowels near the end. I didn’t want a made up word that no one would know how to pronounce and no one could remember how to spell. I didn’t want a combination of words that could be divided differently to yield an unfortunate meaning (e.g., “therapist” or “the rapist”).
• The length wasn’t particularly important. By now, people are used to multiple words in a domain name without having to add “all one word” when saying it. I hope people don’t type the domain name more than once, anyway. Put it in your favorites list or subscribe by RSS.
• I used to believe earlier in the alphabet is better. This is probably becoming less important now that most bloggers have abandoned displaying alphabetical blogrolls. I do believe blogan.net benefited from being early in the alphabet.
• I wanted the name to have some significance to the topic of politics. Although I imagine some would argue I failed on this point, Impolite Company is good enough for me. If you need an explanation, Impolite Company has an about page for you. It helped that I’d recently written on the topic, too.

I found both InPoliteCompany.com and ImpoliteCompany.com were available. Impolite had the meaning I wanted and got it. The other name might still be available if you want it.

Up next, selecting the blog platform.

Update. The Next Web has a great compilation of posts on naming web startups.