Networld + Interop Needs A New Name

We're off to the desert today, for a few days at what should be a fairly interesting Networld + Interop trade show, since there seems to be a real recovery underway -- especially for the networking industry, which is once again attracting customers with innovation that increases performance and saves money.

To better reflect the change, I say it's time to strip away the outdated title and give the show a new name. Whatever that is doesn't really matter, since it can't be worse than the unwieldy N + I tag, a name born out of a strange marriage between a charmingly geeky networking show (Interop) and a series of sales-pitch gatherings (Networld) for the NetWare user community.

Somewhere along the way, the show lost its coolest component, the old Interop show network -- which you had to hook to and operate on, in order to participate. Now that the show's been bought, sold and trampled down a few times, can't it get a shiny new name for the new era of networking? Since I'm terrible at naming things I won't venture a stab, but feel free to let me know your creative thinking, by sending me an email here.

We'll be news-blogging (a new term I just invented or co-opted, in case someone else used it somewhere else first) the show, which means I'll be filing news reports, panel overviews, columns and interviews as much as possible. And if you see something at the show that we miss, let us know and we'll try to pass the info along.