After seeing Juhas blog called "The Techsploder" and thinking that that was such a catchy and unique name (if not a little cheesy), that that would be a great way to have a unique identifier for your (my) blog.

I had the title: Tony Hughes
With the tagline: Diehard Geekzoner (with no vengeance at present)

So I decided, that Tony Hughes, being a common as mud name, was very hard to search on, and produce meaningful results, as there are Tony Hughes' all over the world, presiding over AIDs Foundations, running legal consultancy businesses, operating recording studios, and just generally existiing, and mucking up search results on the real Tony Hughes (will the real Tony Hughes please stand up?).

Looked at my tagline, and thought, hmmm.... "Geekzoner" must be pretty unique. And guess what - it is. I have yet to see a web page with that word on it, that is not connected to me.

So I changed the title of the blog to "The Geekzoner", and now, it gives a meaningful search result on Google, makes it easy to see whos got my RSS feed, who is atrributing stories to me, and just where my blog is being mentioned in general.

Even if the word you use sounds funny, get something unique. Make sure its easy to spell, a two-worder is good, with common words, that dont usually go together, and maybe alter a word slightly, so it becomes unique (but still easy to spell, and not confuse with something else).

It would be wise to have the meaning (or percieved meaning) of the word to be loosely related to what you are blogging about, who you are, where you are, what you do, or what you like.

Check your selection on major search engines, and hey presto: you will have a meaningful unique blog name.

Now go and set up a Google alert, so all occurences of your blog name that appear in Googles index get emailed to you now and again, and you will have a very good idea of whats going on.

Where I see people actually quoting my blog in a story, or referring to my blog, I usually take the time to read some of their site, and send them a thankyou email. (Though I dont do this where people simply republish my RSS through an automated system).

Happy blogging everyone!