I learned from Daring Fireball that Wade Meredith is offering $50 for a worse brand name than Knol, Google's answer to Wikipedia. One of the rules of the contest is that "Cuil," the search site recently launched by ex-Googlers, doesn't count, because it's too obvious.
Good God, was "cuil" a bad name. I had to pause to guess how it's pronounced. Perhaps "quill," suggesting the act of authoring? Nope. The fact that it's pronounced "cool" is not mentioned on Cuil.com; I had to use Google to find out.
It's not cool to call yourself cool; it's lame. I don't care that Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge (which is mentioned on their home page). They're obviously trying to sound like something all the cool kids are doing, using the lame technique of a cutesy spelling.
To make matters worse, in Cuil's logo they make the "i" a different color for no apparent reason, making the remaining letters — which form the French word for "ass" — stand out.
Part of me thinks this can't be for real, that it's some kind of joke. Though "AppKiDo" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue either, so who am I to talk. And if Cuil takes off and becomes the household word it wants to be, we'll all be looking back and laughing at how stupid we thought the name was.
