Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Monday 23 March 2009

Rebranding

Apparently the Sci-Fi Channel is rebranding as the SyFy channel, a name that means nothing when you look at it and a move that is bizarrely inexplicable. I'm told that it's because they believe that they will be able to register this name whereas the generic nature of the previous name prevented this. I'm also told that for various reasons they have clearly received some not-very-good advice on the matter.

(I'm also told, though I can't verify it, that "syfy" is Polish slang for syphilis.)

The press release for the change has some interesting linguistic points about it. For example I can guess that "water cooler programming" means scheduling programmes that people discuss around the water cooler. I can guess it, but I don't know it for a fact.

Apparently they are also creating a new trademark to "travel easily with consumers across new media and non-linear digital platform". Your guess is as good as mine as to what a "non-linear digital platform" might be.

The new slogan is the linguistically unintelligible, "Imagine Greater". I can't find any way to parse this that makes sense.

They are also going to "open the brand aperture" and launch a "new brand evolution". Wonder what it all means.


2 comments:

Cat Herself said...

Sounds like a lot of malarky to me! I sometimes call Simon Si-Fi-Wi, because his full name is Simon Fithian Williams. I think he kinda likes the "si-fi" nick, but he won't admit it to me, of course.

Bob Hale said...

Funny, I had another word for it. :D