We’ve been working the last few months on a sister product to our ImpactWatch media monitoring tool and one of the real struggles has been coming up with a name and accompanying URL. Anyone who has tried to name something in the last five years knows that most good, short URLs are taken by legit companies or being poached by domain name brokers. It’s one of the reasons for the boom in creatively spelled company names like Flickr and Zooomr and scraped together names like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. In doing research, I came across some good articles/blog entries on naming that I’d figured I’d share. So here goes:

The new rules of naming by Seth Godin. The marketing guru and author of Purple Cow outlines his process for naming his new Web 2.0 venture, Squidoo.

The Name Game by Guy Kawasaki. The venture capitalist and Apple evangelist provides tips on how to name your company.

How they named companies by the Day to Day Activities blog. This entry details how some of the largest companies in the world came up with their names. Sample factoid: eBay became ebay only because the domain name echobay.com was taken.

The Name Game by Salon. Great (but lengthy) article that takes a close look at consulting firms that specialize in naming. The article opens with a description on how one naming company made one million dollars coming up with the name Agilent (Agile + Lucent = Agilent).

Let’s ban “cool” codenames that don’t pass search test by Robert Scoble. Microsoft blogger on how placeholder code names can be dangerous for large companies. A discussion ensues on the struggles Microsoft has naming products.