Your Children are a Product — Brand Them Accordingly

There’s a reason Samsung didn’t name their mobile phone products Frisbee that has nothing to do with the fact that Wham-o would probably sue them: if you search the internet for “Frisbee” you get Wham-o’s product from top to bottom in the results, and Samsung could only break into those results with a similarly-named product with significant and sustained effort.

Nothing is stopping you from naming your child “Emma Smith”, but if you do, years from now when someone meets them at a conference and wants to connect later on through whatever has replaced whatever replaces LinkedIn, they won’t be able to find “Emma Smith” no matter how they try to add in related details.

My parents obviously didn’t have the internet in mind when they named me, but I lucked out, and if you’re searching for “Geoff Canyon”, you will absolutely find pretty much everything I’ve ever put on the web, good or bad.

So if you’re planning to raise someone who needs to conceal their history, by all means name your kid “Noah Jones”. If you want to raise someone who people can find online to network with, pick something a little farther down in the Baby Name Voyager.