Sk*rt, the small but quickly growing Digg-style site for women, announced tonight that it’s changing its name and is asking its users to vote for what the new site will be called. The much smaller and just-a-touch younger women’s magazine Skirt.com has been trying to get its hands on the Sk-rt.com domain name for some time and clearly the name is an odd one anyway (I like it, but so goes life). Regardless of why the name is being changed, it’s pretty cool that the company is deciding with a vote.
The old name had a subversive thrill to it and was surprisingly easy to remember. The ten choices being offered for a vote, listed below, range from very cool to pretty darned dorky if you ask me. It’s very cool that a company with momentum is letting its users vote on its name.
The Tech Angle
Built on the open source social news site software Pligg, Sk*rt has quickly taken a leadership position in the cutting edge market it exists in. Ad and blog network giant Sugar Publishing, for example, has been unable to unseat Sk*rt with its rival site SugarLoving. Sk*rt is gaining increasing Silicon Valley attention of late and could very well become the subject of some business news soon.
The site combines user submissions with voting and a Propeller-like editors’ selected stories column. Its vote ranking algorithm is presumably much less developed than Digg’s (age of site and Pligg, am I wrong?) but the site does offer some features Digg doesn’t, like a handy bookmarklet for submitting stories from off-site.
Community
The most important feature, of course, is the woman-centric community. Digg is de facto male-centric enough to be generally inhospitable and comments on some gender-related stories there are so horrifying that no one could be blamed for never returning to the site again after reading them.
Community-specific news sites for anyone outside of the dominant demographic groups or mainstream interests are likely to see substantial growth as the underlying technology becomes less exotic to non-early adopters.
The List
Enough about the old site, though. Here are the 10 names that users are choosing between for the new Sk*rt. Which one is your favorite? Mine’s the sixth on this list. Voting ends Friday night at midnight, presumably PST. You can vote on the company blog.
Name: Jupe
Domain Name: jupejupe.com or jupeit.com, we cant decide.Name: Lemonade (As in when life hands you lemons )
Domain Name: Lemona.de (Kinda weird because it doesnt even need a .com, but thats also why we like it.)Name: Kirtsy
Domain Name: kirtsy.comName: Phlox
Domain Name: phlox.comName: Mesosoup
Domain Name: mesosoup.comName: SheSaw
Domain Name: shesaw.comName: Fierst
Domain Name: fierst.comName: GabOHla
Domain Name: gabohla.comName:19rocks (The 19th amendment rocks.) Actually this can be 19 anything. Ideas?
Domain Name: 19rocks.comName: HolyMoses
Domain Name: holymos.es
Below: The Technology section of Sk*rt
