What's In A Name?

Dateline: 09/22/97 - Weekly feature from your Guide To Personal Web Pages

So long, Joe's Homepage. Farewell, Cindy's World. These days, any personal homepage worth its salt had better have a name (or should I say "title"?) worthy of the hippest zine.

And if you can keep it to one word, all the better.

Take some of my favorite homepages: Glassdog, Found and Chunk . You should be aware that Water formerly was known as the less evocative but more explanatory Maggy's World.

Even family homepages, which tend to be less self-conscious (read: duller) than individual pages, are getting in the act. Why call your site The Reeser Family Homepage when you can lure them into The Fifth House on the Left instead?

Diary titles

Then there's the incredibly rich vein of monikers to be found among online diaries. Peruse the Open Pages diary Webring (what's a Webring?) for a primer in homepage naming do's and dont's. The first thing you notice is that for every Diary of YourNameHere there's a dozen with titles such as Fresh Little Puddles, I am smitten, Aries Moon, and Caveat Browsor. Some diarists even title individual entries.

Often the best site names fall into the poetic/mysterious category (Quiet Foxes, Contemplating the Vair), when they're not ironic/self-depracating, that is. The Place of General Happiness, for example, requires a "NOT!" immediately following.

Some simply try too hard, or worse, worship cute:

The next logical step after titling a site something distinctive is to click over to Internic and slap down $100 for the domain. Yet I'm often surprised how few homepagers actually do so, even those who seem most intent on creating a "personal brand," so to speak. Glassdog and Chunk are rarities in this respect.

The moral of this story

Now that I've had my fun, let me add some thoughts on why this explosion of creative homepage titling is a signpost of something significant.

These homepages are attempting to distinguish themselves from the stereotype of the simplistic "Here I am!" personal site (pet picture+favorite links+resume=homepage). I often call these Release 1.0 homepages since they haven't evolved along with the Web.

The Founds of this world, on the other hand, go to the next level -- "Why I'm here" -- and their titles set a tone, or hint at a point of view, just as the title of a movie or book can. It's interesting that most "offline" diarists don't name the notebooks in which they jot down their thoughts, yet most online journalers title their sites. That's a conscious recognition of the site's imagined audience.

The act of naming also suggests homepagers want their sites viewed as purposeful creative acts, not faddish exercises in HTML. We've thought about how to use the Web artfully to express ourselves, they seem to be saying.

Finally, there's a very simple but compelling answer to the question: Why are homepagers titling their sites?

Because they deserve their own names.