SpiralFrog, the advertising supported (free) music downloading service that will launch in December, seems to be hellbent on repeating each and every mistake of the dotbomb era.

The first clue is the pointless name. Smushing together two random words to create a new compound word was a dotcom badge of stupiditiy, a la FatBrain, FogDog, BlueMartini, RazorFish, RedHat, etc. The next step was to capitalize the second word in the compound: SpiralFrog. This late nineties affectation is called a “CamelCase” type treatment (it’s a hump thing, started by programmers). Third, and most importantly, give away your product in hopes of creating lots of traffic and ad revenue.

Anybody pumped to work for stock options, the love of foosball and free- flowing m&m’s? Financially speaking, “SpiralFrog” should prove to be a prophetic name choice.

How to name a company

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Parfums de Coeur (a Connecticut company) is selling body spray, deodorant and “body wash for men” under the brand name BOD Man. Their website touts one “flavor”of BOD Man, called “Really Ripped Abs”, as “a fragrance with the staying power of a man”. It fails to say which man, however. Ewww de Cologne indeed.

But whether you chose Really Ripped Abs or one of their other “flavors”, like Player, Rock Hard or Fresh Guy, you’ll be puzzled to know that all BOD Man flavors are “a whole new way to wear fragrance”. They don’t say what that new way is and we don’t want to know.

Perhaps this “new way” is necessitated by the fact that the body spray is is flammable and should not come in contact with fabrics.

What kind of man wears BOD Man, you ask? According to Walgreens.com, people who bought BOD Man also bought lipstick and nail polish.

Enough said.

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Does this domain mean that AT&T Worldnet is about to make a name change? We don’t know, but we sure recognize the naming style.

Actually, we think the name is the best of its genre. Nice work.

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