Sepia Mutiny v/s India Uncut

India Uncut, run by an internet acquiantance of mine, is a great name for a site that positions itself as a daily source of interesting, Indiacentric and, most of all, independent news.

The India in the name says...well, India and the 'Uncut' qualifier says independent. A perfect example of a simple name that stands out in a milleu where people tend to ignore the simple when choosing names. Like the name, there's not much more that needs to be said about how effective it is. When something is simply effective, it doesn't need an essay-like explanation to tell you why it is. It just is.

Sepia Mutiny on the other hand goes in for the interesting, USA-relevant tactic of colour-type plus aggression.

Sepia (a darker shade of brown) and Mutiny (an aggressive word that blasts into your brain) combine to deliver South-Asiacentric news to a desi audience. I'm not sure how they came up with the name but I suspect it might have something to do with setting right certain misconceptions about brown people in USA. Well, whatever it is, it certainly is an intriguing word combination that does a good job of cutting through the clutter. And no, 'Brown Mutiny' wouldn't have worked. (It sounds too crass.)

Thanks to some smart naming ideas, and good marketing, these two names have established themselves as credible news sources in a space that's very, very hard to make a name in. My heartiest congratulations to them. And for those who'd like to see how the numbers for the two names add up, here are the Übermeters.

India Uncut
Stop-start scale: 7/10
Long and Short cut: 7/10
Story meme: 7/10
Urlabilty: 8/10
Übertotal: 29/40

Sepia Mutiny
Stop-start scale: 7/10
Long and Short cut: 7/10
Story meme: 7/10
Urlabilty: 8/10
Übertotal: 29/40

Desi Pundit
Stop-start scale: 7/10
Long and Short cut: 7/10
Story meme: 6/10
Urlabilty: 7/10
Übertotal: 27/40

Adden for the dumb: The first two names are not competing with each other but are beng compared purely from the point of view of how they sound, originality and linguistics that matter. And then there's Desi Pundit, which is kinda like India Uncut without the Uncut and thus not as clutter-blasting as Uncut.

Moredendum: Abhi, one of the clutch of fine writers in the mutinous bunch, writes back to me with the origins of the name Sepia Mutiny. As is sometimes the case, the truth is far more prosaic than fantasy. Here it comes. The name is not much more than a combination Sepia, which is a kind of ink, and a riff on the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. I got the the Mutiny of 1857 part but I didn't think the Sepia was meant to represent writers' ink. Ah well, I wonder what the audience thinks about the origins of the name. Or maybe they don't. After all, not everyone has time for such trivial obsessions. Thankfully.

Aside from all that: Another thing we can learn from the above comparisons is which names require taglines more than others. And for those who haven't learnt anything from all my yammerings, a name like India Uncut says it all without the need for a qualifier. Sepia Mutiny doesn't.