Madman Elliot Back has beautifully quantified the words that most commonly appear in the names of blogs:

Wondering how people name their blogs is an old question, never answered to my satisfaction. Fortunately the Blogwise directory hosts a list of 33810 blogs. Extracting the names of each blog from the directory itself took some work, but the result is this text file of blog names, one per line. Now that I got the raw data, it’s time to go to work.

Quickly coding a solution in C#, I wrote a program to tokenize the blog names by whitespace and punctuation, and place the resulting words in a hashmap for counting purposes. This gives a tab-delimited (paste into Excel!) text file of words used in blog titles and their frequency…

…The top word, used in 9.986 percent of the blogs surveyed was “blog.” The next most popular, at 2.619 percent, is “life.” Here’s the top 10 words in a blog’s name:

1. blog – 9.986%
2. life – 2.619%
3. weblog – 1.841%
4. world – 1.296%
5. from – 1.226%
6. journal – 1.139%
7. news – 1.087%
8. thoughts – 1.039%
9. with – 0.670%
10. daily – 0.660%

Elliot goes much deeper into the mire here. It’s no surprise that most blog names are intuitively descriptive, for that is the norm across all product, service and company names. The result is a manky swirl of achromatic Gesso.

The key to powerful naming is finding the metaphor less traveled.

Blogging from Squaw Valley Ski Resort, where we have been blessed with 48 hours of non-stop rain. The good news? Forecast teperature for each of the next three days is a winter wonderlandy 69 degrees.

Still, it could be worse. Bill O’Reilly could be getting laid this year – in Nevada anyway.

That visual should stop those sugar plums from dancing in your head.

If it was good enough for a rodent, it’s good enough for a marsupial.

Just in time for Christmas, which is actually summer in Australia, and explains a whole lot, comes news that kangaroo meat may henceforth be called “australus,” as in, “How do you want your australus? Rare, medium or well done?”

The folks behind this rebranding effort claim they want to encourage more people to eat kangaroo meat, but we think there is a more sinister motive — pest control.

To us here in the Northern Hemisphere, the kangaroo is a cute hopping animal, most notably epitomized by “Kanga” one of the stars of Winnie the Pooh’s universe. In Australia however, even though it is a national symbol, it is a pest. With nearly 50 million of them running around, there is a yearly culling to control the size of the kangaroo population. And what do they do with the culled roos you ask? They make pet food.
They also sell the meat as people food. But the only people who really like kangaroo meat are the Japanese and the Germans who turn it into sausage.

If this rebranding of a rapidly multiplying pest sounds familiar it is. Remember the coypu? A few years ago, Louisiana was swarming with these water rats who were eating everything in sight and causing untold amounts of damage. So the folks in Louisiana decided, it was either eat or be eaten. But who wants to eat water rat? So their solution was to rename the rat Nutria.

So you see, renaming kangaroo meat “australus” is really just pest control disguised as fine dining.