Comments on: Reference Question of the Week – 1/28 http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2007/02/03/reference-question-of-the-week-128/ or, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk Sun, 26 May 2013 01:12:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: herzogbr http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2007/02/03/reference-question-of-the-week-128/#comment-138 herzogbr Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:52:04 +0000 http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/?p=47#comment-138 Thanks Jessamyn – perhaps the key is to mention it beforehand. I also like your idea of using locations, and I’m going to start suggesting that.

It seems the only real solution is to keep adding and adding words, which makes the email id longer and longer. It occurred to me that this might create a market for selling short email id’s, but a quick check on eBay only found one auction for an email id (which seems to me might violate the user agreement).

]]> By: jessamyn http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/2007/02/03/reference-question-of-the-week-128/#comment-137 jessamyn Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:11:58 +0000 http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/?p=47#comment-137 Oh man, I go through this a lot. I usually go with name/birthdate, or a lastname/firstname combination or something in another language, a pet’s name, a nickname, something, anything.

Often I brace people for this ahead of time and warn them that they need a few choices, that there are 20,000,000 people with Yahoo accounts so their name needs to be pretty unique. I’ve had good luck with location names [beckyinroyalton] first/initial/last combos [jijobrennan] and nicknames [myrleflorice]. Mostly I just help them get through that part quickish because they will sort of sit there all day trying names out and it’s good to have some sort of guidance to give them.

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