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Vacation is finally here and my blogosilence will be deepened for a couple of weeks. So in order to avoid eternal condemnation..... a post!

Actually it was vacation preparations that made me think of names. We are going to Storsjöyran in Östersund end of next week. It is a music festival with some bands we know from before and lots of bands we have never heard of. So in order to get the most out of it I browsed the web for audio samples from all the bands. Youtube is the best place to find stuff fast and it worked fine for most bands. Bands like Kuda, Kira Kira however was tricky to find. Up with last.fm where only musical artists are searched for and it was easy to find. (last.fm has remade their design - looks really nice.) This made me think of the importance of good names.

Another factor to take in account is the named items popularity. Madonna might not have been that good of a name if it was new today. Now the word refers more to the artist and less to the holy virgin Mary then surely was the case when her career started. The artist has redefined the meaning of madonna with her popularity.

This applies to all kind of names that is in need of searchability. Musical artists, companies, pieces of software, magazines etc. Brands really. Basically all named objects that have a long life and need to be easily found with the help of a search engine. I figure that a movie might not need a uniwue name although it wouldn't hurt.

Generic search has made it more important that names are unique across all domains whereas before Internet it was sufficient with uniqueness within the domain at hand. (Thinking about Madonna again....) Global uniqueness has been important also but recent developments may change this. A bit at least - so that global uniqueness within a language will be sufficient.

Anyway - I'm gonna have a well deserved vacation with as little computer time as possible. (I still need to log my geocaching finds....) And return back with new energy that hopefully will extend into the blogosphere.