thoughts and observations of a privacy, security and internet researcher, activist, and policy advisor

Monday, October 09, 2006

Identity of Names, Blogs, Corners, Bands, and Parks

It is really funny when there are two blogs on identity management that happen to have exactly the same name: Stefan Brands at Credentica and Nishant Kaushik at Oracle both run a blog called "Identity Corner". Seems like Nishant has finally noticed it and is now re-naming his blog. I read both of them and personally don't care about the headline on the website, because my feed reader filters them into folders named the way I want. And as long as the URL is different, you can easily distinguish them anyway. What do they think domain names were invented for? For the identification of different websites, stupid!

But it is interesting how branding, trademarks and identity intertwine here. Another story on this: There is a Lincoln Park in almost every American town, and you would not mistake "Lincoln-Park.WashingtonDC.org" for "Lincoln-Park.Los-Angeles.net", would you? Interestingly, some people did this with the band Linkin Park. It's a nice story about marketing and domain names: Their singer Chester Bennington
thought that it would be a good name for the band because there are Lincoln Parks all over the country. He figured that the band would be recognized as a local band no matter where they went. (...) However, since the domain name "lincolnPark.com" was already taken and the band couldn't afford to purchase it, they changed the spelling from "Lincoln" to "Linkin" so they could purchase the domain name "linkinPark.com".
In fact, this final name search also appeared after a couple of name conflicts. And the story is that many people in fact thought they were a local band before they became famous. So following Linkin Parks' example, my suggestion to Nishant for the new name of his blog would be something like "Identiti Korner". This also sounds much more Web2.0 - if you like it or not.

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