Googling and GoDaddy’ing for a baby name (or Baby 2.0)

In my Mother’s day, they picked names for their kids either out of the names they had heard and had in their head, or bought a little name book at the store and flipped through it to see if something caught their eye.

In business, it is common practice (for tech companies at least) to see if the business name idea is available as a .com domain. In fact, at Provo Labs it is required routine. Whenever we are brainstorming a business name we always check names we like on GoDaddy to see if they are available as a .com.

When Adria and I name a child we often use Google to help us find variants of a name or to look up meanings in other languages. Naiya (our 5th child) got her name off of Google – we were looking for a word for Mermaid (because she was born at home in the water) in another language that sounded good as a name. We Googled word variants in other languages for mermaid and found that Naiya was Greek for Water Nymph, or Mermaid, so Naiya it was.

Perhaps it is partly due to the above business practice, perhaps it is due to me being in the business of creating web businesses or some combination of them both, but while we were thinking of names this week for our baby that was born today (our eigth child) we not only used Google, but also Godaddy. That’s right, we were checking domain availability for our child! Preferably, the first name would be available as a .com, but it was acceptable if first and last name .com was available. So it was that when we kept coming back to the name Serenity, we knew that serenityburns.com was available so it was able to stay on our list. So as soon as we made the decision that Serenity was to be her name, we purchased the domain and I installed WordPress on it.

Now, not only does Serenity have her own domain, she also has a blog . We plan to use it as an online baby-book and to be a journal of her life. This has led me to wonder how many babies this has been done for. Surely we’re not the first ones to decide to blog our babies life from the begining!

Is Googling, Godaddy’ing and blogging Baby 2.0?