Bad URL's?

Choose your URL's wisely! There are many cases of unintentionally offensive web addresses out there. The classic example of this is penisland.com (read: Pen Island).

Another crappy (pardon the pun!) URL:

publishit.com


Here's an interesting story involving a bad URL:

An employee at a software company was fired for visiting a particular website. Which site was it? Experts Exchange. But why? It seems like a legitimate site that one would go to in order to find help on various topics.

However, in the URL it was expertsexchange.com, which probably triggered some filter.

That issue's been corrected now and the site is now realized as experts-exchange.com.

It's literally crap!

Poolife
Here we have Poolife, a company that sells pool cleaning products.
Seen anything wrong yet? Have you parsed the named as POO LIFE thanks to a missing L?

This especially hurts for such a product since the name now has a negative connotation (you don't want 'crap' in your pool!) and many will read it like the way described above. It certainly wouldn't hurt to double up on the L in the name...

All that Yaz

Yaz


Okay, so it sounds similar to "Yes" and is only 3 letters long, but that's all the positives there are to this name. It's got a terrible commerical too, with people singing a cover of "We're Not Gonna Take It", what were they thinking? That's gotta backfire... It also sounds too flashy ("razzle-dazzle") for a freakin' birth control pill.

EEE-nough already

The Asus EEE PC


Technically it's not spelled with all capitals, Eee. However, it is still an initialism. What it stands for is a bit redundant: easy to learn, easy to work, easy to play.

Guess they needed to resort to tripling of the letters since the i-craze, e-craze, x-craze, what have you, is so cliche now.
What's to stop someone from seeing "NEW EEE PC" and thinking it has to do a shoe size width? Also, wouldn't you want your products being AAA quality rather than low-grade sounding EEE?

Interlude: Shouldn't that be a code XXX?

Here's an interesting news item:

A Wyomissing man was charged with possessing pornography when taking his computer to Circuit City to install a new DVD drive. How did the technicians find out? They were looking for videos that were already on his hard drive so they could tell if the drive is working, and it just so happens they stumbled onto a child porn video.

Here's the best part: According to court documents, there is "something called code X" that must be installed in order for certain videos to play properly.


(They actually meant codecs.)

Have an X-treme X-mas

What better holiday than Xmas to capitalize on the "X" craze?


Not a terrible way of branding, but it only works if you actually pronounce Xmas like "eks-mas"... it sounds somewhat out of place in a formal setting.

Nobody Duz It Better

Here's an oldie from 1951:

Duz