Names, Tags
Weekend in Review
As usual this year, I spent about 16 hours a day in the office this weekend working on IMP. I could look at the check-in logs to see what I did, but honestly it’s kind of all run together in a blur.
Notable additions included adding artist homepage urls (so you can just give out http://siteaddress.com/your-page) and an embedded music/book/video browser for that page so that people can sample your wares without leaving your page. As I’d mentioned earlier, I had a bet with Mr. Kelly that I could finish that without impacting any of our other schedule items, and I think that I’m on target. The site is looking great and is becoming addictively usable.
Tagging and Information Retrieval
Besides numerous little tweaks and bug fixes I’ve testing out Alex King’s PHP Tag Engine so that artist can tag their media with whatever terms they want. This move happened after a bit of a theological debate within Brain Murmurs, myself, and Mr. King as well, concerning the importance of tagging versus genres or categories.
The bottom line was, everyone had good insights and the choices we have made have had a lot of consideration go into them, which is great. I myself appreciate the value of tags but have also spent a lot of time working in the field of information retrieval. Tags are a great way to add meta data, but they’re only good for finding the things that people think to tag. Tags are a powerful, simple adjunct to a good IR methodology, but they’re part of the final answer, not its totality.
That IR background is going to really liven IMP up as we move forward. I have a lot of ideas that I’m dying to start working on, mostly involving getting exposure for people’s art trapped within The Long Tail.
Names, Names, Names
Honestly, what has really gotten me wrapped around an axle is the task of coming up with a decent name for this beast. “The Independent Media Project” has always been a working title, but I figured that we would be moving over to a more appropriate name at some point in the future.
So far the quest to find a good name has been elusive and terrible. Many sanity points have been spent. People have actually raised voices at each other about this (a problem with labors of love like IMP is that the people working on them are, well, passionate about it).
Great naming moments in history
When asked the name of their band at a show Syd Barrett belted out “The Pink Floyd Sound”, pulling it together from the names “Pink Anderson” and “Floyd Council,” a couple of bluesmen he’d been listening too.
Richard Brannon called his record label “Virgin” because neither he nor his compatriots had any experience at all in the record industry.
The Rolling Stones, also caught by surprise when asked for their name, referenced a Muddy Waters song.
The first product Motorola started to develop was a record player for automobiles. At that time, the most known player on the market was Victrola, so they called themselves Motorola.
Steve Jobs suggested “Apple” for his company name in reference to his own time working in apple orchards.
Arrrgh. Arrrgh. Arrrgh
Names can be simple, they do not have to be complicated. I realize that there are marketing companies that get paid obscene amounts of money to do this kind of thing, but history has also shown that, once people get used to a name, it’s the association with the name that matters and not the name itself. Consider ebay (online auction), last.fm (online radio), slashdot (geek news), and others. With the exception of the ‘fm’ in ‘last.fm,’ none of these names actually say anything to the reader about what will actually be found at their site. There is certainly nothing memorable or intuitive about the names. People have just gotten used to them. They work.
We could probably call ourselves spinningtwofisteddeathpunch.com or indie-art-kumite.com, or simply skooker.com (my son’s word).
June 25th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
I like ’skooker’