What do YOU call your blog?
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. Here’s the top 10 breakdown:
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:
- blog - 9.986%
- life - 2.619%
- weblog - 1.841%
- world - 1.296%
- from - 1.226%
- journal - 1.139%
- news - 1.087%
- thoughts - 1.039%
- with - 0.670%
- daily - 0.660%
This leads me to conclude that any blog named, “My blog/journal/weblog with daily world news and thoughts from life!” will be a smash hit. If you’re interested, here are the top 10 words from the Technorati popular blogs:
- modblog
- daily
- girls
- suicidegirls
- nikki
- weblog
- media
- from
- page
- boing
As you can see, there is little overlap between the top 100 blogs, and the population as a whole. Part of this is the tiny sample size–I don’t have enough blog names to harvest interesting words. The other part (which is pure speculation) is that unique blogs use unique words in their names. Continuing deeper into the data, a look at the top 750 words shows an interesting trend:
This is the famous “long tail.” Basically, some words are extremely popular in blog titles, and the rest of the words are ranked relatively equally, with a slow decreasing trend. Number 3045 and 6078 are only 1 mention apart, in the 33810 blogs surveyed. Here are the top 100 words used in popular blog titles:
- blog
- life
- weblog
- world
- from
- journal
- news
- thoughts
- with
- daily
- girl
- mind
- what
- this
- diary
- musings
- online
- about
- just
- ramblings
- random
- your
- adult
- love
- content
- little
- that
- home
- blue
- time
- marketing
- blogs
- right
- digital
- things
- city
- rants
- internet
- like
- free
- journey
- words
- business
- more
- notes
- place
- real
- house
- american
- view
- stuff
- music
- black
- chronicles
- tales
- times
- diario
- dreams
- another
- adventures
- inside
- corner
- other
- photoblog
- confessions
- book
- living
- soul
- head
- heart
- search
- truth
- live
- reality
- good
- brain
- here
- vida
- geek
- through
- eyes
- thought
- blogging
- politics
- personal
- page
- site
- days
- dream
- john
- thinking
- have
- left
- road
- something
- lost
- project
- into
- media
- where
- design
- conservative
- star
- mundo
The rankings go a little bit over 100, because the last few entries are all used with equal frequency.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 21st, 2004 at 9:42 am and is tagged with trend number, interesting words, hashmap, whitespace, raw data, boing, punctuation, speculation, satisfaction, blogs, population, girls, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
76 Responses to 'What do YOU call your blog?'
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on December 22nd, 2004 at 6:43 am
Hmmm. Very interesting. So would you recommend renaming my blog into the ‘dailygirlyblogweblog’?!
on December 22nd, 2004 at 8:28 am
[Blogosfera] Come si chiama il tuo blog ?
Carina ricerca sui nomi dei Blog. Pare che la maggioranza non abbia molta fantasia….
Fantastica l’ affermazione :
This leads me to conclude that any blog named, “My blog/journal/weblog with daily world news and thoughts from life!” will be a…
on December 22nd, 2004 at 1:33 pm
I named mine alice says (in Spanish) much like Simon says, only I don’t get people to do anything.
on December 22nd, 2004 at 5:55 pm
Hi there
I Call my blog “public(MIND) - explanation:
“I believe in the network as a catalyst, as my consciousness, as a part of me. With PublicMIND I try to expand the dimensions for what I am, can and will! ”
Best Regards
Hans Henrik
on December 23rd, 2004 at 6:14 pm
Also, the ever infamous lyric from a favourite band is always a good name for a blog. I am guilty of such an act.
on December 23rd, 2004 at 10:31 pm
My blog name is a little more mundane. It’s either just the topic of choice, or my name–how … average!
on January 21st, 2005 at 3:27 pm
And speaking of average…I’m happy to see that I didn’t make it into the top 104, despite my very generic-sounding blog title.
on January 21st, 2005 at 8:56 pm
magnoy’s’amsara
on January 22nd, 2005 at 8:38 am
Top 10 Words Used in a Blog’s Name
Elliott Back has put together an analysis of the top 100 words used in a weblog’s name… blog life weblog world from journal news thoughts with daily (Via Google Blogoscoped)
on January 22nd, 2005 at 7:41 pm
Hmm don’t think any of the words of my blog title made it into the top 10. Guess that’s why I get next to no visitors - oh, and the lack of positioning and posts.
Exception is the soul of Humanity (www.droplet.com.au~/zensei/)
on January 22nd, 2005 at 8:36 pm
I think mine’s a little more original in title — I called it a Brain Dump.
on January 23rd, 2005 at 1:48 am
@Bobbie: Haha–nice try, but even *you* cannot escape statistics. “Brain” ranks number 76, while “dump” falls lower yet, at 1052. Combined rank? 2% in obscurity.
@Ben, “Exception” ranks 28790, dead last. In fact, it wasn’t in any of the titles in my dataset. “Soul” is 68, while “humanity” is 3508. Your combined rank? 37% in obscurity.
@Magnoy, I would say yours is 100% not in my dataset
on January 23rd, 2005 at 6:58 pm
I called mine “upsalt”, which is a literal translation of the dutch word “opzouten”. And that means something like: bug off!
on January 24th, 2005 at 4:59 am
I call mine “Tripe Soup” . I seem to get a lot of hits from searches, people looking for recipes and get mistaken for food blog.
on January 24th, 2005 at 8:34 am
I haven’t seen the name of my blog on the list either. “Helmet Hair” (it’s a blog about motorcycle riding, if you where ever in doubt) But in the description I have the ever classic “blog”. I wonder if it’s good or bad to have these common words related to your blog.
on January 24th, 2005 at 11:02 am
Well, fine. My OTHER blog is called The Grocery Cart Poet. Do those words show up on the List Almighty?
on January 24th, 2005 at 4:01 pm
What Do YOU Call Your Blog?
Here’s an interesting breakdown on the top words used in blog names. Elliott Back writes on how people name their blogs.
The top word, used in 9.986 percent of the blogs surveyed was “blog.” The next most popular, at 2.619 percent, is “life….
on February 1st, 2005 at 2:34 am
mines blog on blog. do i get extra points for blogx2?
on March 14th, 2005 at 7:56 pm
Sure Sam!! Except that it statistically doesn’t matter, because you add two of the same probability together and then divide by two… ^_^
on March 16th, 2005 at 6:08 pm
My blog is called “Divine Interception“, and out of all those words you listed above, I barely use any of them. I try to be as origional and thought provoking as possible. And… well, I get no traffic either.
The title usually doesn’t keep me from reading a blog, usually it’s the way a blog is designed or bad grammer that keeps me from returning. I hate the complicated sites that have these lame pop-ups saying, “++…I.<3.U…4Eva…++“, and other lame sayings. And title won’t save a lame writer as an administrator, if you ask my opinion.
Anyway… check me out at my site, I share it with friends and I’d love more readers. Enjoy your day.
on April 9th, 2005 at 10:51 pm
We compromised and put “blog” in the url but named the blog… All the RAve - the RAnts of RA, where I get to sound off about stupid things that bug me.
on April 12th, 2005 at 9:57 am
now i know why my name came up here. interesting data. i’m sure i could somehow drop this ‘information’ at a wine and cheese party and impress strangers. maybe i’ll get my picture in the newspaper. i hope they don’t show the coffee spill on my shoes.
on June 10th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
people search my name a lot. i like to look at the list of places my name comes up. probably because i am hopelessly shallow and narcis- narcci- narsi… vain. i’m still not sure why your site came up on a search result for onewetleg but interesting subject matter, nonetheless.
have fun.
on June 26th, 2005 at 9:01 pm
Why do people have the same idiotic responses like “mine is called this and why doesn’t show up”? The point this was a survey of a limited number of blogs (33,000 if I remember correctly) and thus maybe your blog wasn’t listed. I’ll be the first one to tell you that each your blogs just like each of you is a unique and special snowflake that must be treated with care and concern. But let’s be real, most of it is probably bullshit and we’d be lucky of half of it was in english.
on June 27th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
I’m a “unique and special snowflake”.
How inspiring. Very interesting little bit of data you’ve rounded up here. Thanks for posting it.
on July 3rd, 2005 at 7:21 pm
Choosing Your Blog Name
When a coaching colleague asked me for some advice on naming their blog, I said, sure, I’ll send you some comments. That was a week ago and I have a phone conference with that colleague in just over an hour from now, so I need to come up with some use…
on July 23rd, 2005 at 2:13 am
[…] s like there’s work to be done. For more information about blogging and naming, see What do you call your blog.
[…]
on August 4th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
[…] d a quick squizz through this Des Walsh article, and an interesting Elliott Back article - What do YOU call your blog?. Neither article explicitly told me what to […]
on August 15th, 2005 at 6:40 pm
I appreciate that you keep your site going and allow comments. To me feedback is an interesting part of a website.
on September 14th, 2005 at 2:25 pm
Interesting. The only thing, though, is that your method leaves out the crazy few blogs that don’t use any separation between the words in the title. For example, mine. It’s called “milkandsugar”. But then again, I can’t really blame ya, teaching a computer to separate words without any clear place where to separate them is quite the difficult task.
on November 7th, 2005 at 5:51 pm
Mine is named “ACT LIII” or for those of you that don’t remember how to count in Latin… “ACT 53″… 53 is my age - next year it changes to ACT 54…
on November 11th, 2005 at 9:06 pm
hmm. mine’s also very common… Lifelog.
on November 17th, 2005 at 1:10 am
don’t decieve ur readers. focus on blogging. content, not sill keyowrds, r the thing
on December 15th, 2005 at 5:18 am
[…] Why the name “I Got Off My Assets”? Well, I was researching how people name their weblogs, I came across Elliot Back’s website which had some interesting statistics on what people are calling their blogs. […]
on December 20th, 2005 at 6:23 pm
Hey guess what, I call my blog ‘Personal blog’ YAY…I’m the average blogger!
on December 29th, 2005 at 10:25 am
When a coaching colleague asked me for some advice on naming their blog, I said, sure, I’ll send you some comments. That was a week ago and I have a phone conference with that colleague in just over an hour from now, so I need to come up with some use…
on January 2nd, 2006 at 12:20 pm
[…] Elliot goes much deeper into the mire here. It’s no surprise that most blog names are intuitively descriptive, for that is the norm all product, service and company names. The result is a manky swirl of white noise. […]
on January 4th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Small wonder then that my site’s name (curious? search Google for “Lapides”) just doesn’t make it! But I do get lots of traffic anyway.
on January 5th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
USA Today mentioned this post today: blogs.usatoday.com/techspace/2006/01/the_whachacalli.html
on February 8th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
my blog is called “Doja: Prettie on the inside.” subtitle “but you can’t see”
it is the daily postings of a vegan, libertarian pansexual girl in the midwest.
on March 9th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
i picked the very first thing that came to mind when it was time to sign up. no regrets yet. found this from someone who is apparently seriously researching how to rename a blog!
on May 3rd, 2006 at 5:31 am
yea, theres some reaaly interestin names thrown up here , some i have to say are quite dull though , i was writing a blog a couple of months ago and couldnt think of a name for it .. sent abt 4 hours thinkin abt somethin that appealed untill i realised how much time i had wasted … there it was it struck me like lightning ” waste of time ” , thats what i called my blog .. lol ..yeah i know its cheesy .. but wat the heck its better than weblog or life .. yuck
on May 12th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
[…] Un article sur les titres de blogs : elliottback.com/wp/archives/2004/12/21/what-do-you-call-your-blog/ […]
on May 17th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
[…] Readers of the best blog in Grandin have likely noticed I change my blog’s subtitle more ofthen than I change my underwear, and there’s a reason for that. Pure and simple, it’s an alteration of identity. I’m systematically destroying the old static self in the pursuit of the “best me”, and settling into patterns is something I don’t want to do anymore. There’s even been an interesting little study done on how people choose their blog’s “sub-line” or subtitle. LINK […]
on July 5th, 2006 at 5:08 am
[…] Before I start, I should probably explain the title. As many Scrubs or Colin Hay fans might know, it’s the opening lyric from the song “Overkill”. To be honest, I chose it because I thought it sounded nice - after all, there are only so many blogs that can have “blog”, “life” or “world” in the title. (Although, funnily enough, I have been guilty of all three in the past…) […]
on July 5th, 2006 at 9:18 am
[…] Before I start, I should probably explain my choice of title. As many Scrubs or Colin Hay fans might know, it’s the opening lyric from the song “Overkill”. I could pretend that it has some deep, reflective meaning in the context of this blog, but to be honest, I chose it because it sounded nice. After all, there are so many blogs that can have “blog”, “life” or “world” in the title (Although, funnily enough, I am guilty of using all three in the past…). […]
on July 12th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Interesting to say the least. Are we talking domain names or blog titles.
I think the domain should be short so I went with my last name. Lucky thing it’s a weird last name too.
For the blog title I went with ‘Your Financial Freedom” which I don’t see the list above either. Oh well….keep on posting.
-Terry
on August 7th, 2006 at 12:24 am
[…] What do YOU call your blog? by Elliott Back (tags: blog name statistics) […]
on August 11th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
[…] Here’s some research on the most common words in blog names: What Do YOU Call Your Blog? […]
on August 24th, 2006 at 8:29 am
” [name] goes nut”
“[name] wothout a clue”
…and that kind of names, are they good (I have a blog title like that… :-/ )
on August 24th, 2006 at 8:30 am
Oh, I made a comment on a very old post…but I dont have a clue…
on September 1st, 2006 at 9:40 pm
I named my blogs “Health, Abuse, Terrorism and Poetry” because all my blogs were based on my title.
I think that”s very important.
Suranee
womenrain.blogspot.com
on October 15th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
Great article and analysis - I have a humorous take on the naming process over at my own blog (StrayText) if anybody is interested.
on November 13th, 2006 at 11:08 am
So…
My weblog with thoughts on life and daily journal of news from the world…
would work. 9 out of top 10 words used.
:o))
on November 20th, 2006 at 9:21 am
[…] I read somewhere that the blog name and blog titles should be terms that people often key into search engines. It needs to be snappy and memorable and should say something about you or the business you do. According to Elliott Back’s article, What do YOU call your blog?, the top three search words are “blog”, “life” and “weblog”, so if you have these terms in your title, it’s more likely that your blog would be featured in search results and hence is more likely to be read. Des Walsh in his article Choosing Your Blog Name  advises businesses to include their business terms in the titles. So if you are a plumber, you should have a name such as plumbingworks.wordpress.com. […]
on December 4th, 2006 at 6:39 pm
Eat My ******* Stilettos pretty much sums up my f-you attitude to the world of hypocrites, morons, and losers.
Plus the fact that I like to wear stilettos doesn’t hurt, either.
on January 27th, 2007 at 1:02 am
I chose the name Bytes from the Back Seat for my blog because I drive a cab and the word Bytes can do double duty. ie I record sound bites from my cab on my blog in computer bytes. Sure the spellings not the same but I like it.
on January 29th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
[…] 30 Jan 2007 Naming your Blog Posted by Jaffer under General , Web While searching for a good name idea for my blog, Icame across Elliot Back’s research on the top 100 list of words used in blog names on the net. I’ve got ‘daily’ in mine, which is #10 . I’ll change the name to something more meaningful once I decide what direction I want this blog to take … […]
on February 5th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
[…] On this blog I would like to be able to talk about anything that is worth talking about, regardless of the subject. I will discuss sailing, music, travel, family, friends, news, politics, work (yes, even work), faith and other subjects.. For that I need to change the name of my blog. Any suggestions are welcomed. I just read a post on naming a blog which has some interesting data. […]
on April 6th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
[…] The next step is choosing a name for your blog. I can’t even remember how the name LuckyRenee came about, but one day, it just was. Read this article by Elliot Back for some insight. Whichever name you choose, make sure it reflects you and your blog. In addition to a username, a pseudonym, or pen name, is often used by bloggers to protect their identity. Read this article by Moira Allen, editor of Writing-World.com, when considering using a pseudonym. […]
on April 13th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
A very interesting post. Thanks.
I offer an explanation for the name of my blog AT THIS LINK
on June 24th, 2007 at 9:13 am
I named my new blog NEWLEAFTIMES because it represents the tips and thoughts that I plan to post regarding little things we can do to turn a new leaf in our lifes. Also, newlifetimes was available as yahoo mail AND I plan to open an Outreach Support Services business called New Leaf Outreach.
Have a great day.
on July 17th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Not only the name of the blog is important but just as important is the post titles. The Page Optimization WordPress plugin adds a subtitle field to your Write Post page and then puts that subtitle in line with your title.
Title Optimization: Balancing Understandable Titles & Targeting Your Keywords
seo.seocompany.ca/title-optimization/
Here is how I set up the code on my blog.
Blog Titles: Code to Setup Titles & Meta Descriptions
seo.seocompany.ca/blog-titles/
on July 20th, 2007 at 5:11 am
As many people says to me that I can talk or write about many things in life than noone, and because everybody says that I’m courageous on talking about specific issues (and I know that I am), I have names my blog as my personal portrait, i.e., as everybody sees me… the “Single Mind”.
Usually people reads the title. If the title is attractive, they will read the message, otherwise they’ll pass. You can not do this reading my blog. I have a lot of irony on the messages, and the titles are mostly ironical. So… a boring title for you can contain a wonderful message. Or… a suggestive title for you can turn you bored on reading the message.
That’s it… it’s me, my personality. Only really who knows me reads the blog.
on August 20th, 2007 at 11:10 am
[…] A couple years ago, Elliot Back took the initiative to survey 33,000+ blogs to discover the most common words used in blog titles. While the blogosphere has evolved somewhat in recent years, his results are still fully relevant when searching for a name for your new blog. […]
on September 23rd, 2007 at 10:14 pm
[…] Back, E. (2004) “What do YOU call your blog?” Retrieved on September 25 from the world wide web: […]
on October 2nd, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Sure sounds like you have a love of statistics. Cheers to you!
on November 30th, 2007 at 12:39 am
[…] I guess the main takeaway for this post is that my friends and I talk a lot alike. But what about chatters as a whole? Well, I can’t tell you that. (Though I suspect it’s a lot like us in many ways, as you can see.) What I can tell you, though, is how common the words in this blog title are. Which is to say, not very. (Even including the subtitle.) Here’s a great link about popular words in blog titles. “Data”, “mine”, and “shaft” are nowhere to be found in the top 100. Guess that’s means I’m part of the “long tail” of blog names. That’s pretty hardcore. Ha! […]
on December 4th, 2007 at 12:36 am
hmm i havnt named my blog as yet.. blog doe i suppose, or perhaps a blog by any other name is … well you get the picture. do i care if any of the words are in the top 10, 100, 32,000 probably not. but i did find this a very interesting read.. including all the comments, well most of them.
on December 30th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
[…] Also I read another blog a while ago about the words most used on blogs. My blog title has none of the top 10 blog title words within it. Then again it only has two words. A problem? Perhaps, BUT when we come to most used words within blogs, and “blog” is the most used word and look! it appears… 12 times! And I’m not dedicated enough to go through the rest of the list and make relations to this first post. […]
on January 10th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I’m trying to come up with a more catchy title for my blog. In the past it was “Crazed’s Musings”, “Random Ramblings”, “My Blog”, all those usual words used in a blog title. Not much in the creativity department. A blog title should reflect the blogger and the blog’s general focus. Of course it would help if my blog was more frequently updated!
This article wis very informative. The most used words in blog titles were right there in my own blog!
on January 12th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
[…] Perhaps that’s why so many blog titles and descriptions are so self-effacing. Incoherent Ramblings, Another Blog, Just Another Blog…. Take a brief look at the top 100 words used in blog titles. First is “blog,” third is “webblog.” Ok. But #17 and #21 are “musings” and “ramblings”, respectively. #20 is “just”–signaling humility. #22 is “random.” People don’t know what blogs are when they begin. […]
on February 5th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
[…] This list was called from research I found on this page. […]
on February 27th, 2008 at 7:14 am
I think this is an interesting question.
Here you can find more information. live.com
on April 4th, 2008 at 7:11 am
YAY for TechieNATION.COM !
HEhehehe, that’s what I call my blog ..
on May 14th, 2008 at 4:03 am
Astroloji, günlük burçlar, burç uyumları, yükselen burçlar, aşk ölçer, haftalık burçlar, aylık burçlar, aşk falı testi, burç uyumu.