Branding
December 5, 2011 at 11:53 PM by Dr. Drang
Three things I remember fondly about Spy magazine:
- That it always referred to Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian.”
- The “Separated at Birth” feature, which spawned two books and was probably its most famous continuing piece.
- The “Logrolling in Our Time” feature, which chronicled the mutual masturbatory reviews and cover blurbs authors gave to each other’s books.
Spy is no longer, which is probably for the best. If its editors tried to monitor the treacly admiring links that bounce back and forth between bloggers, they’d be quickly overwhelmed.
On an unrelated note, have you noticed that Brent Simmons—that suave master programmer and blogger-about-town—has really upped his output lately? And his recent posts have been especially insightful.
Case in point: last night’s post on bloggers forgetting to put their names on their sites. It hit home.
I wonder if @brentsimmons is talking about me? inessential.com/2011/12/04/you… He did manage to find my name today, but I bet it was hard.
@drdrang Dr. Drang
@drdrang It was hard! Yes, you made me think of it. :)
@brentsimmons Brent Simmons
I used to have my name (OK, pseudonym) right under the snowman photo in the sidebar, but when I rejiggered the site a few months ago, the name got lost when I moved the photo up into the header. To rectify matters, I just added it to the timestamp at the top of each post—a bit redundant, since I’m the only one who posts here, but it’ll do until I decide on something better.
Frankly, the branding of this site has always sucked. In addition my name being hidden, the domain name doesn’t match the blog name, which is clumsy and stupid. I remember when Merlin Mann mentioned me on an episode of MacBreak Weekly a few years ago; he called me “that guy from Leancrew.” Which did not exactly drive loads of traffic to the site.
There’s a history behind this lack of coordination. When I bought the leancrew domain, I was expecting it to be the base of several internet activities, done under my real name, of which the blog would be just one. (Those of you who know who I am IRL have probably figured out where “leancrew” came from.) Under those circumstances, it wouldn’t make sense for the blog to have the same name as the site. But when I decided to blog pseudonymously, I forgot that doing it on leancrew.com would preclude me from using the domain for anything under my real name. Whoops!
(If you’re new here and don’t understand the blog name, read this. It’s why I post a birthday greeting every October 9th.)
So here I am several years later with a pseudonym, a blog, and a domain name, none of which match. Not exactly what you’d call a farsighted internet strategy.
