Well, megazone.com has been taken by squatters for years now. I know, I keep checking on it. I actually missed it by a couple of weeks way back around 1996. (The current whois says created in 1998, but that’s wrong, it actually changed hands between squatters.) I spent too long thinking about it, and when I went to register it it had just been grabbed. I’ve asked a few times about buying it, but the lowest asking price has been $5,000. Like I have that kind of money. So megazone.org has been my personal domain since 1996 – and I don’t want to use that for this site.

I also really didn’t want to make it too much about ‘me’. I did think up a few plays on my name, using ‘mega’ or ‘zone’ – like techzone, technozone, megadget (WAY too close to Engadget I felt). But all of those domain names were either taken, or I felt the name was either too lame or too forced (or both). Basically all the ones I liked were taken.

Plus I’ve talked to a couple of people about being guest bloggers, and if I add more bloggers to the site on a (semi-)regular basis, I’d feel weird about it being fronted by my name. I’ve talked to Dave Zatz about blogging a few times, and we got to sit down for a bit at CES, and he’s had similar concerns over ‘Zatz Not Funny’ now that he has Mari & Brent contributing regularly. Our conversations certainly fed into my thought process on the name selection.

Gizmo Lovers was arrived at basically though process of elimination – and most of the candidates that were eliminated were due to the domain being taken. I felt it was important to have the most obvious version of the domain for the site. If I have to explain it (oh, it has a hyphen, or a weird spelling, etc) then it isn’t as effective. Being able to say “I’m with ‘site-name’” and have someone remember the name and be able to go right to it from a browser was an important criteria – and that also pretty much dictated a .com domain.

I didn’t feel that ‘Gizmo Lovers’ was too close to ‘Gizmodo’ – and the truth is there are really only so many words to describe the genre, as it were: gizmo, gadget, tech[no], and gear, pretty much. And there are lots of tech sites using combinations thereof. (I’m kind of surprised Gizmotaku isn’t taken – though I bet it is soon now that I said that. I don’t want it – I do not consider myself ‘otaku’.) It isn’t like I tried ‘Gizmondo’.

Gizmo Lovers wasn’t my first choice, but it ended up being the best name that wasn’t eliminated, and I’m not unhappy with it. I think the similarity to the old name could help ease the transition as well, less confusion.

The new name is good. The new color scheme is not.

Dan – I was waiting for that. I used to get complaints that the old colors (which were the four colors of the TiVo logo) were too ‘dull’ or ‘washed out’, and that I should do something ‘brighter’ or ‘higher contrast’ to make it easier to read. So the new scheme is kind of ‘ANSI mode terminal’. I do think the new green is easier to read as it is a lot brighter against the black than the TiVo green was. The red is almost the same. Yellow seems to be OK, and isn’t used a lot anyway. The blue I’m on the fence about, it may be too bright.

On my list of things to do is to give people the ability to switch to different color schemes. I have that worked out, I just need to find the time to do it.