Requiem for an 'N'

Many of you longtime BetaNews...oops...Betanews readers will have noticed starting last week with our CES 2009 coverage that we not only got fatter over the new year (contrary to everyone else with designs on losing weight) but we got a trim up top. Yes, just like myself, there's a little less bushiness on our head this year, and we went lower-case with the "n" in our name.

Now, does this mean anything? In this era of great and stirring symbolism, is there some dramatic statement that goes with the lowering of our "n?"

Believe it or not, no. There for awhile, it was in fashion to take spaces out of your proper name, as in SkyLab and BlackBerry and RadioShack (just when it started adding space to Shack stores, it removed the space from its name). But for an online property, case sensitivity isn't really all that cool. And since we wanted our new logo to look more like our URL, we imagined all the stupid explanations we'd be giving to our news contacts as to why our logo says "betanews" but our name is "BetaNews." "Uh, Mr. Ballmer...that's with a capital N." (When I first started in this business, I wrote about "MicroSoft Corp." Anyone remember?)

If there's anything that really bothers us in the grammatical department, it's the notion that brand names must be capitalized even when they're not really. With all due respect, folks, the original name of the GPU company was (and still is) "nVidia," but since we've seen the company use "NVidia" and most recently "NVIDIA" (when it's not an acronym), we'd rather just stick to one form only, and I'm trying to get in the habit of typing "Nvidia." So no, Sony, it's not "BRAVIA;" and it's "Vizio," not "VIZIO." We love our iPhones, we love industry analysis firm iSuppli, and we dig comScore's statistics.

But all these capital letters flying everywhere else but the beginning makes our copy look like programming bugs. So while we got fatter in the middle of our page, we lopped off some from the top of our "N." It's just easier this way. Of course, now Tim has to go back to writing our name the way he had been doing it...just when he'd finally gotten into the habit. Oh well, now we can make that ad deal with Walmart.