Cedar Mill Communications

A good name is like a good reputation – they are both good things to have. The difference is that a reputation is something your earn and develop over time. A name is something that you just come up with.

I’m in the midst of helping a company we work come up with a name for their social media and blogging site. It’s not as easy as you would think.  I’ve done many naming project over the course of my career and it’s always a challenge to come up with something distinctive that everyone agrees is a winner. Occasionally, the light bulbs will go off and name will instantly materialize. More often than not, it’s a grind.

One of the places I’m looking for inspiration, beside the company website, are blogs and online communities and forums. There is certainly no lack of advice on the naming front.

One of the more interesting is The Name Inspector blog who recently broke down the 10 categories that account for all the name in the TechCrunch directory. These are primarily high-tech startups. The categories span everything from compounds to made up words. My favorites are the puns like LicketyShip and Memeorandum.

I’m also checking out the Snark Hunting naming and branding blog for bits of humor and inspiration. Also offered up there is the “Building the Perfect Beast” free naming guide, complete with a handy tool for evaluating the quality of your selected names.

For additional inspiration, I also visited HotForWords, although it’s not entirely clear what sort of inspiration I’m getting from that one. Got any great tips for coming up with names? Please share them. Or else there will be nothing but a bunch of bad puns on the horizon.

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A while back I mentioned a bit about my life as a freelancer. How nice it is not have to commute to an office every day, how Brian and I can — and do — budget time in our mornings to walk our three dogs (a perk that we certainly didn’t have working for somebody else). I have time for piano lessons and Brian can leave early for his weekly soccer matches. Yes, it’s pretty nice for us.

It’s also pretty nice for our clients. They don’t have to provide us desks, vacations or health insurance. We perform the work and absorb the costs of those things as part of “doing business.” They get nearly a half century combined of pr, editing and writing experience for a pretty fair price, if I say so myself.

In Brian, clients get a guy with all that experience who actually loves technology. He likes to read about it in Wired, online, the Wall Street Journal, etc. He loves to keep up the latest social media (he’s got 300+ followers on Twitter). And he makes sure our setup here at the ranch is the envy of the neighborhood (we were the first on our street to have DSL).

I keep up only so, so. I think of it as technology by osmosis. My Facebook page isn’t too bad and I just updated my Plaxo profile, so I’m getting there.

I bring to the table a love of language on par with Brian’s technology obsession. I pour over our local newspaper, The Oregonian, and The Wall Street Journal every day. I’d take The New York Times too, if I could afford it. And because I love books too, I belong to two two book clubs, one formed with an old friend several years ago and the second I put together with my English students — a group of German women who came to Portland with their families for work. I love to read and discuss books and news and ideas.

One of my favorite books brings it all together: “The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way,” written by one of my favorite writers, Bill Bryson. The book blends humor (a must as far as I’m concerned) with fascinating information about English, like how busy and bury came to be pronounced. Why isn’t it bussy and burry? Humm.

So, businesses out there take note. With freelancers — heck with us — you get experienced people who work fast and well and actually love what we do so much, we spend our free time indulging in it. In this economy take on a freelancer. You won’t be sorry and hey, if you come by in the morning, you might even get to walk the dogs with us.

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I didn’t go into journalism to edit. When I was in junior high school and deciding on my career path, I was pretty sure I’d travel the world, find quaint villages or gorgeous places to write about for National Geographic. But back in San Marcos, Calif., where I got my first non-school writing job on the local weekly, I had my first brush with a real, live editor. I’ll never forget how appalled I was with what he’d done to my first news story. It was more red ink than black, but liked it anyway (!).

Since then I’ve written for daily and weekly newspapers, consumer and trade magazines and now for public relations agencies. I love the writing process. I love sitting at my computer, cup of coffee at the ready, a warm dachshund in my lap (maybe the other two dogs flaked out nearby) and pondering each word — each a pearl of course, each perfection for that sentence.

But I’m an editor too. And after the pearls have been strung, after I’ve taken the dogs out or gone to the gym, after I’ve let time clear my head, I have to go back and coldly evaluate. That’s when the real work comes in — deciding which of those pearls to pitch, which ideas just didn’t work and, of course, where the commas should go.

Do it wrong and nobody looks good. Do it right and everyone wins.

In a world where an individual’s or company’s first and only impression may be on a screen or a printed page, taking the writing seriously is obvious, but don’t forget the editor. Everybody needs one.

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When it comes to new gadgets and technology, my attitude is bring it on. I’m willing to try anything. But the things I keep and cherish have one thing in common: they work and they work well.  Whether it’s a bicycle wheel that stays true or a phone that I can drop in the water and have it keep working (the Casio G’zone), things that do their job effortlessly are keepers.

The operating system on a computer is pretty vital.  Its main job is to connect all the applications, printers, Web sites that I need to do writing and PR and to keep them safe from bad guys and prying eyes. Oh, and it needs to do all this quickly. With the Vista operating system, I think Microsoft wanted to make the OS more visible and lost sight of what we really need from an OS: for it to just work. Vista has a tendency, at least on my desktop system, to randomly slow down and then crash, although it does seem secure. But the biggest problem is that it’s just slow. And it’s not my computer, which is plenty fast and has more than enough memory and disk space. Vista is just a slow and inefficient OS.

More than once, I’ve considered switching over to Linux or dropping back to XP. But in both cases, I would have to give up enough in the way of features that I haven’t made the downgrade. Plus, it would be a hassle. Still, I was more than ready when the Windows 7 beta came out last week, with Steve Ballmer proclaiming “we heard you.”

Now, after downloading and installing Windows 7, it appears that Microsoft did in fact hear us, and get it right. It works. I simply upgraded my existing Vista install and everything came up roses — working fine. The user interface is clean and easy to use, and, more importantly my computer is back to being fast. Windows open now. Even Outlook 2007 is running better and faster.  Since this is just beta code, hopefully the experience will continue to improve as we get nearer to production.

If you have Vista, save yourself some time and get Windows 7. Even in beta, from what I can tell, it’s a nice improvement.

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Reading Twilight, the latest “it” book, is like joining a cult. I knew it the moment I heard it had a young, male and very sexy vampire as the antagonist. I also knew my daughters would love it. And it would bring us just that much closer — discussing Bella and Edward’s ill-fated love, the Washington town of Forks so near to Portland in distance and climate, and of course just how sexy Edward is. The latter naturally the biggest draw for the 4-book series.

I knew it would be all those things that books can be: a private indulgence and an instant in with those who’ve read them. “Have you read Twilight?” will gain me entre with Ginny (and eventually Jessica) and every other woman I know — cuz it’s women that read these things, right?

Brian wants to know the story, fusses about the unorthodox vampires (whaddaya mean they can go out in daylight?), and just generally wants to trick Ginny into spoiling the story for me. Ah, but she’s quick that one. She knows that a good story can remain fresh and exciting, even if a few bits leak out.

Those bits just might be enough to lure him into the books. And make him a Twilight addict too. We shall see.

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Clearwire (now just Clear) along with Intel are launching a new Wi-Max service here in Portland.  Normally I’m all over new technologies like this, especially ones that improve Internet accessibility. 

In professions like PR, writing, editing and such, reliable Internet access isn’t an option, it’s mandatory. As such, I’m always interested in technologies that will make Internet access easier, faster or both. For example, we were the first on our street to get Verizon optical and a healthy speed boost over Comcast.

Clear is blanketing the Portland metro area with the long-distance version of Wi-Fi, offering claimed speeds of up to 6 megabits per second for downloads and 1 Mbps for uploads. That’s not bad for wireless, but way behind optical. So I’m not going to be trading down just for the sake of using new technology.  Maybe if we lived on a street not served by both Verizon and Comast, Clear might make sense.

The value I see in Clear, for me at least, is on those occasions where I can’t find a Wi-Fi hotspot.  This does happen from time to time. But Mary and I both have BlackBerry handhelds that let us do the basics until we get Internet access somewhere.  So would it be nice to have Clear? Yes, but it’s not $50/month nice. It’s rarely even $10 per 24 hours nice (one of the options), since that would be mean buying a $50 Wi-Max modem.

The challenge I see for Clear is that this technology is late. Really late. It would have been great to have this 3-4 years ago before fast 3G networks and free Wi-Fi hot spots popped up everywhere.  Without something like Clear, we have all figured out how to get Internet where and when we actually need it. 

To make matters worse, we are rapidly moving beyond dependence on the PC.  The great thing about smartphones is they are always on.  I can check e-mail in seconds — while walking the dogs. If I gave up my phone-based data plan for Clear’s service, I would be back to having to boot up (and wait) for the laptop. No thanks.

It will be interesting to see the marketing and advertising pitches from Clear over the next few weeks. Still, unless the service gets a lot a sweeter (i.e. faster and cheaper), I’m going to be a late (or non) adopter on this one.

I like the idea of Wi-Max and I want to see it be a success, but I’m struggling to figure out how to make it work for me. I’m guessing I’m not alone on this one.

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