What’s in a name?

Posted August 3rd, 2006 at 6:37 am by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 13 Comments / Filed in: Behind the Scenes, General

Some people find out they’re having a baby and instantly decide on the name, drawing on some beloved great aunt, celebrity du jour, or favorite city. Others agonize over baby naming books in search of just the right moniker. In naming this blog, we decided to reach out to members of the Yahoo! family for a little help. And help they did, suggesting more than 2,400 names.

The winning entry came from the mailroom. Mike Brodick, a facilities manager at our Sunnyvale headquarters, said the name rolled off his tongue when he heard of the contest. He won a spiffy digital camera for his lyricism. And so it is, we christen this blog the “Yodel Anecdotal.” (For those of you mystified by the yodel reference, that’s what we call the little tune at the end of our commercials… Ya-hooooo!) Click below to hear it.

With contests like this, you don’t often hear about names that weren’t used, so here’s a look at what didn’t fly. Top contenders included Planet Yahoo!, Exclamation Point (in honor of the punctuation mark that’s part of our trademark and continues to exasperate copy editors the world over), Yahoo! DNA, Yahoo! Insideout, Yahoology, and The 25th Letter (we’ll save you the counting — that would be the letter Y).

Other submissions fell into a number of categories. There were the nostalgic entries, including Gulliver (as in Gulliver’s Travels, which includes a race of brutes called Yahoos), Akebono (the name of Jerry and David’s first server), and The Officious Oracle (homage to Jerry and David’s original acronym, Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle — but you knew that).

There were other yodel references: Behind the Yodel; Yodelicious, The Yodelgram, The Daily Yodel (who needs that kind of pressure?), Yodelayeehoo!, and I am Yahoo!, Hear Me Yodel. We had double entendres and word plays, such as Yahoo! Ink, Yahoo! Dotcommentary, Key Words, and Yahoo! What When Where & How.

A number of suggestions played on various utterances with double o’s: Bloghoo, Hoo Ya, Yahootenanny, and Oohay. And since we like purple around here, there were the inevitable color references — Purple Planet, Purple Is the New Black, and Purple Nurple. Some poked fun at the corporate nature: Corporate Monkeys With Typewriters, Pure Cane Sugar and The Yahoo! Corporate Blog. And others capitalized on blog addictions: I Went to Work Today and All I Did Was Work on My Blog and Shouldn’t You Be Working?. We also had several with international flair: Tout le Yahoo!, Y Tu Yahoo! Tambien, Yensei, and 訝好 (or “Wow, Astonished!”).

Some sounded like something you’d hear on a rap channel: ’sup, Yahoo!?; Yo!; That Yahoo! That You Do; and Pimp My Yahoo!. Some Yahoos flaunted their (sometimes peculiar) sense of humor, with Blog Blog Who’s There, Bloggy McYahoo, and We Will, We Will Blog You. Others still have us scratching our heads: Everything by the Lederhosen, Holdmeclosertinyyahoo, I Like Purple Socks Daily, and Scrax (which is apparently the silver stuff that you scrape off lottery tickets. Please use that in a sentence today).

One of my personal favorites was Lorem Ipsum, but that may be because it was the dummy type I stared at on mockups for weeks.

Like all new parents who have to choose between so many great options, we hope this one fits. Either way, the birth announcements are in the mail and we can’t wait to watch this kid grow up.

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13 Comments Add your own

Kevin Lim | August 3rd, 2006 at 7:57 am

The blog name was a little too geeky for me at first, but when I said it out, I realized it had a nice ring to it. The other entries sound plausible too, but they didn’t have an equivalent uniqueness to them. Oh, and the prize was a Nikon D50…. Woah mama!

Mohan S | August 3rd, 2006 at 8:04 am

Best Wishes for Yodel Anecdotal, Looking forward to it :))

Guillaumeb | August 3rd, 2006 at 8:42 am

Wow! that was a lot of suggestions. I love most of them! Planet Yahoo! seems to have already been used by the aggregator of Yahoo! blogs. By the way it might be a good idea to add it here in the sidebar. (http://planetyahoo.zottmann.org/)
Now I guess we, as users, can’t really decide if the others would have been better until we read more content. So far the chosen title sounds great…I guess it also depends on the atmosphere of this place in the future.

Keep up the good work!

PS: laugh @ Lorem Ipsum :)

John | August 3rd, 2006 at 10:04 am

I still find the name a bit wierd… Yodel anecdotal??!!

Kyle Korleski | August 3rd, 2006 at 11:22 am

Yeah, I find the name kind of odd as well but at least it’s more creative than the 25th letter (yeah I said it).

Darek | August 3rd, 2006 at 11:52 am

I would have suggested ‘Et tu, Yahoo?’, looking forward to more interesting posts in the future.

alessandro | August 3rd, 2006 at 4:12 pm

The name is perfect!, don’t seems weird to me.
For a Blog, I mean. If I had a baby I definitely wouldn’t ask to Mike for some name suggestion! :-))

Congrats to Mike and to you all.
And best wishes for your baby! I’ll be here as much as I can, to watch it growing up.

caroline | August 3rd, 2006 at 7:08 pm

odd name, i agree
whatev :)
go yahoo blog!

jalansutera | August 3rd, 2006 at 10:30 pm

weird name… but I like it very much. congrat..

Karthik | August 4th, 2006 at 4:39 am

Nice Blog.. Good to see one from Yahoo my favourite Internet portal.. I love the design and the name is pretty creative i guess..

Congratulations for deciding to use Wordpress..

DavidM | August 4th, 2006 at 6:55 am

My favourite has to be Holdmeclosertinyyahoo. Completely silly and irrelevant but quirky and kinda warm.

Not that I dislike Yodel anecdotal.

everysandwich | August 4th, 2006 at 7:09 am

Thumbs up on the name, but I’m a sucker for rhyme. The header pic, though, gives me a bit of a Matrix feel.

everysandwich | August 4th, 2006 at 7:11 am

addendum — whoops, those headers are rotating. Well, I’m sure you know the one I was talking about.