SVUG #1: Do I have to put the ! in Yahoo!?

Yahoo! MySpace. eBay. E*Trade. Why can't these people spell their own names? Mangling the Valley's biggest brands in your writing makes you look stupid. Yet inserting capital letters and punctuation marks into the middle of proper nouns feels like a different form of stupidity — a voluntary one. Is there a rule for handling them? Technically speaking, doofy Net names fall into three categories.

• Multiple words without spaces, like TechCrunch.
• Deliberate miscapitalizations like eBay.
• Punctuation marks in names, such as Yahoo! which is like Snap! but not E*Trade.

Smooshed-together website names like MySpace make sense. The brand is built around a URL, and international Web standards say URLs can't have spaces in them. It's as sane as naming your company 1-800-DENTIST. But while ebay.com is easier to type than, say, e-bay.com, why spell it eBay and not Ebay or EBay? Even the grammar Nazis at tech news sites can't agree. CNET always spells it eBay. Wired News switches to EBay at the start of a sentence. The New York Times does the same, then blows it by spelling RSS as "R.S.S." How to minimize your own embarrassment? SVUG pored over a few publications' style guides, then dragged them to Trash and reverse-engineered the following formula:

• If you're working a deal, stick to the company's crazy spelling. That means Yahoo is Yahoo! (or after a few friendly meetings, Y!)
• If you're not trying to butter up the company, drop all exclamation points and question marks. Other punctuation marks - dashes, dots and colons - can also be omitted. No one really spells it Nielsen//NetRatings.
• If you aren't sure of the capitalization, use standard English: Techcrunch, Ebay, Etrade.
• Close up multiple words to look smart. SecondLife is an OK goof. Valley Wag is not.
• Are you a techie? Cram all brand names into one lowercase word: etrade, myspace, secondlife, rss, boingboing. The Shift key is a sign of weakness.

Valley brand names sobered up after the dot-com crash (goodbye Snap!, hello Federated Media) but YouTube mania is likely to send them south again. Remember: When in doubt, close up the gaps and spell it normally. And be glad you don't work for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.

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