How to Name Your Blog

Since I just joined the teeming masses who think that their personal musings are somehow worthy of being recorded for all the world to see, I thought it would be an opportune time to tell you how I came to name my blog.

Of course, I don't think anyone really cares about the history of the name of my particular blog (such an interest would qualify a person as a ninth-level etymology weirdo), but in the process of naming my blog I had the chance to study a number of other blogs, and surveying the names of those blogs led me to discern a few principles that seem to be followed by lots of bloggers.

Please bear in mind that the principles I describe below are intended to apply to personal blogs of the "I'm Joe Schmoe and I have something to say" variety. Such blogs have their author as their unifying theme, and are usually a collection of anecdotes, observations, rants and the like. When a blog has a consistent them or topic (e.g., "The Life and Times of the Patagonian Cavy"), it generally moves outside of the realm of the personal blog and into the realm of information resource in blog form, and so follows a different set of rules.

Be Clever / Memorable

First things first: your blog is not for you, or at least not mainly for you. The act of writing may be for you, and may bring you perspective / clarity / catharsis / whatever, but when you take your words and heave them up onto the Internet instead of keeping them in a private journal or scrawling them on your cell wall, you are doing that because your blog itself is a social device by which you hope to affect or interact with others. People's motivations for blogging vary, but whatever their reasons, it's not as though bloggers just happen to be keeping a collection of personal writings and couldn't care one way or another if anybody else stumbles across those writings. They are leaving their writings out so that somebody else has a chance to pass by, leaf through them, and possibly develop an interest in them. Much like the neighbors who leave their shades up at night, bloggers want people to notice them.