What's In A Name?

I am a closet brand marketer. I often create "brands" (OK, I make up words - usually by combining multiples that when pronounced sound like another existing word) that I think could be interesting or evocative. Over the past decade, I have kept a running list of potential brand names (or tag lines) for the most random things... from fictional band names to non-existent apparel companies to portajohns (toilets) to my own music/tech aggregator "mediaor" (pronounced like "meteor").

As backwards as it sounds, sometimes these words provide a spark for a product idea that I may explore in the future (yes, I have a separate list for those).

For the "brands" that I think have some real potental (or just amuse me) I will go grab the domain name for too. In my opinion, the most promising ones are the ones that express an idea or feeling ("Google", "Amazon", "iPod", "Twitter"), not a literal product implementation or feature ("Search.com","Toys r Us", "CDnow") .

What does this have to do with anything? Well, I have been struggling with how to refer to my latest projects (e.g. "friendP3", "meP3", "ambient signal".). The labels of the implementations were constraining the larger ideas around passive publishing, content resolution, data aggregation and portability, the social graph and sharing. I know some will say that is stupid... "why try to brand it at all?". Well, if you want people to talk about something then I believe you need to provide them a common lexicon to do so (it also helps people find and track the conversations on topic - see Twitter).

So, now that I have made a short story long, I come to my point. For now on I am going to be referring to the collective of my recent music/tech science experiments as "Playtapus".

Yes, it is a combination of "play", "tap" and "us"... but also more a play on the fugly yet lovable platypus. No one is quite sure what it's place in evolutionary history is, but if nothing else... it's at least interesting. Really all this project aspires to be...

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