If there is any step in starting an online journal that will short-circuit your brain, it's choosing the right title. Oh, sure, there are huge moral and technical issues to tackle, but no other step seems like so much fun at first but ultimately brings ulcers and sleepless nights.

And why not? To many, putting a name on their writing is no less an emotional committment than naming a child. Your title is you, essentially, when it comes to online journals; on link pages, mailing lists, and if you're lucky in search engines. And as many longtime web diarists have discovered, even if you later change names half a dozen times, there will always be people who insist on using only the very first one.

So picking the right name is vital. For some it's just a clever hook, but for others, it defines the character and mood of the journal through and through.

Where No One has Gone Before

Without a doubt, the first thing you should do before committing to any clever, catchy title is to see if someone else has already taken it and run it into the ground.

Though I do say so myself, the best place on the web to start is The Diary Registry, where about 1,000 sites are listed and arranged a number of ways, including by title. The second largest collection of journal sites would be Open Pages, but since the list of titles isn't sorted (and broken into groups of 20), it might be a bit of work to get through.

But those two sites only cover online journals specifically. It's vitally important you scour a fair portion of the web in general to make sure your title doesn't also happen to be the name of a European feminine hygene product.

And I don't mean just a quick search at Yahoo!. Online journals (and, to a lesser extent, feminine hygene products) often come and go far, far faster than the folks behind that Old Faithful of web directories could possibly track them. Although their list of individual sites seems extensive, it only covers a fraction of the World Wide Web.

Instead, try one of the kitchen-sink search engines. Digital's AltaVista and Infoseek are great places to start. For some reason, HotBot is also quite thorough in the areas that matter. There are gobs more, though, including Excite, Webcrawler, and the NBC-owned Yahoo! wannabe Snap!. (To supplement the hand-sorted link lists, both Yahoo! and Snap! use Inktomi, the same search engine as Hotbot.)

Make sure you sort for both variations of your title as well as the complete, specific title. That is to say, in addition to searching for 'bark,' 'worse,' 'than' and 'bite,' search for "Bark Worse than Bite." (Usually, that means doing a search both with and without quote marks around your title.) You never know exactly how someone will remember and later think to search for your page.

How Not to be Seen

Given the limitless creativity of the creative mind, its much easier to start of with a few awful ways to go about finding a title for your journal.

First of all, put at least some thought into giving your writings a distinct character, especially if it's merely a subsection of a larger site. That means steer far clear of titles like "Journal" (or "Diary") and "My Journal" (or "My Diary"). That might be what you call the link from your main page, nestled between "My Friends" and "Favorite Links," and even what gets slapped between the <TITLE> tags, but when it comes to being even remotely memorable (and findable), you'll need a bit more.

There are also types of titles that should be avoided at all costs. "Journal/Diary of" an anything, for one. "Day in the Life of" an anything, too. In fact, phrases that include the words "Life," "Book," or "My" have probably been done before, and even if not, will probably get lost in the crowd. (All bets are off, of course, if you have a weird name or a bizarre job.)

Also, there's something about the letter 'R' that spawns duplication. Altogether there are nearly a dozen journals named "Reflections," "Ramblings," or "Random Thoughts."