What is in a name? A blog by any other name would still tell as complete.
As noted earlier, our name, IPO Facto is a play on IPO and ipso facto. We rejected a number of alternatives including IPnomics, IPiquant and Posts on Intellectual Property Provoking Analysis (suggested by our economist Pippa Hall). Once we settled on IPO Facto, we searched the blogverse and found a number of sites using the common phrase, 'ipso facto' but none with IPO Facto.
However, Michael Factor, noted that the name of his blog, the IP Factor, and our blog share characteristics which he has looked at from a legal perspective. We, as economists, would posit that, as our commissioned research on parodies has found, this coverage is likely correlated with larger audiences and may increase readership of both blogs.
Is the blog name market becoming crowded? A quick look at lists of popular IP blogs reveals heavy use of the terms: IP, blog, copyright, patents, law and legal in their titles. Not particularly surprising but it does mean that naming a new blog, and finding an appropriate domain name, can get tricky. It also explains why you often seen blogs with non-IP associations such as animals (kat and llama), surnames, food (spicy) and bad puns.
And if you think blog naming is difficult, how about IP office naming? The Dominican Republic has the beautifully named ONDA which happens to mean 'wave' in Spanish. Mauritius, Pakistan, New Zealand, Israel and the UK all use 'IPO' and a number of other countries have variations on IPO. It would seem that naming in the IP sector requires someone skilled in the art.
If you have questions or feedback, do comment on this blogpost and we’ll do our best to respond.
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1 comment
Comment by Michael Factor posted on
Nicole,
I am not claiming rights to the IP bit. It's the combination of IP and Factor that is distinctive, and IPO FACTO is similar to.
Anyway, good luck with the blog,
Michael