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.

Oh, yes, we’re going corporate. But please don’t hold that against us. It’s a good thing, really. After the successful launch of a dozen or so Yahoo! product blogs, we thought it was time to create an überblog of sorts so we can cover a wide range of topics that all bring us back to the big purple house of Yahoo!.

We want to share insights into our company, our people, our culture, and the things that occupy our cluttered minds. We’ll cover emerging trends, provide some behind-the-scenes commentary, profile interesting Yahoos, spotlight our beloved users, reveal some of our quirks, tap into guest bloggers, sprinkle in some videos and photo essays, and generally think out loud (lucky you… you get to listen). You’ll hear from interns to executives. Some days we’ll be light and airy, others we’ll get serious.

Sure, we’ll touch on some Yahoo! news now and again, but we’ll try to put a new twist on things and make every visit worth the mouse-clicks. And of course the whole point of a blog is the conversation loop. So comment away — this place is an echo chamber without you.

Think of this site as the front door to our home (work with me as I posit a questionable metaphor): In our kitchen, we’ll offer you a cup of coffee and direct you to the fridge door, where we’ve displayed the things we’re most proud of. We’ll demonstrate our latest inventions from the workbench in our garage, engage in healthy debates around the dining room table (pass the pepper, please), and sink into overstuffed chairs in the living room to share some of our favorite photos. We’ll point out the shower where we do our best thinking (apologies for the visual) and the den, where we goof around. All with the goal of getting to know each other a little better. Mi casa es su casa. We’ll just call you Kramer.

On that note, since we often get requests for tours of our Sunnyvale headquarters, we’ve prepared a little virtual tour to give you a sense of a day in the life of a Yahoo. We’ve called you a cab – just hop in and come have a look around. And do stop by often — no need to ring the bell.