New blog name (On Techies), let's start over

How important is a blog name? a startup name, a brand? I’ve seen a fair number of posts lately about how difficult it is to name your startup and some others that offer advice on what to do to ease this difficult task. Mashable tells you how to pick the perfect name, Jason Cohen tells you to just pick a name,VentureBeat has a checklist, Jason Calacanis advises to keep it short, Darmesh Sha offers 17 mutable suggestions and GigaOM has a two-part rule to name your startup. All of the above posts offer great advice, and yet, most of us will still use names that mean something to us or our target audience/clients… even if the name goes against the advice given in the posts I mentioned above. Most of us just follow our gut when making these type of decisions.

I am going through the process of finding a new name for this blog, I need to have a new name. It is not because I think the name is too long, or because the name is hard to spell, or hard to remember, that is not the cause. I need to change the name of this blog to avoid infringing other blog’s trademark, really. Since I am the new kid on the block it is the right thing to do, the least thing I want to do is to get into a legal fight over a blog name. One of my goals is to get out and meet more people, making friends and not the opposite.

The goal of this blog is to list useful information, to post news, events and every once on a while an opinionated blog post in support of all the geeks in the city of Austin, TX where I work and live. Finding a new name is definitely a hard task, it is not the task itself but the process one goes through to find the perfect name, as if such thing exists…

Coming up with the current name “Austin Tech Geeks” was easy and it was a no brainer, it has the 3 words that describes me and what I hope to be my audience as well. Using these words as the blog name and domain name has also been extremely useful for me, it helps me get traffic from Google searches and the blog’s search rankings for many combinations of these words is pretty good.

I’ve been researching various names, playing with words and even different languages. It is actually kind of fun to be doing this. I have been looking for domain names that have the word “geek”, “hacker” or “techie” but haven’t really found something that I really like for this blog.

Some of the names that are high in my list are the following:

• cityhackers.com
• ontechies.com

As the saying goes, “when life gives you lemons make lemonade”, this is an opportunity to make this blog more inclusive so other geeks/techies/hackers outside of Austin can feel part of it as well. Not only my fellow Austin geeks.

What do you think?

I am planning on making a decision about the name and domain name in the next few days, once the new name and domain are chosen, I will update the name of this blog, the LinkedIn group, Twitter handle and Facebook account. I hope I don’t lose any of my followers because of this change… a name is just a name, correct? everything happens for a reason (often for the better) and I am sure this change will bring great things for this blog and all the people involved in one way or another with it.

Do you have a suggestion for a name/domain name? do you like one of the names I have listed above? please use the comments section below to offer suggestions for different names or to show your support for one of the names above.

May the force be with Y’all!

Ricardo.