Jason Murphy

The Name.

Aug 14, 2007 Blog General

This post has been brewing in my head for a couple of years ago. Why I never took the time to flesh out the idea is beyond me. I think I was waiting for the creative writing bug to hit, hoping to pass off the idea as something more grandeur than it really is. But now that I’ve challenged myself to write a quality post every day for 30 days, I’ve started harvesting all the loose ideas I’ve had for posts over the years. Sorry, no sparks of wit and creativity are going to make this post funner than it is. Instead you get me at what is less-than-optimal operating conditions to attempt to write in complete sentences. For tonight I’m hopped up on NyQuil and Pseudophederine trying to combate a sinus infection.

And what a wonderful opportunity to try to answer the question I get asked the most:

Why is your site called The Jason Murphy Show?

Each time I’ve answered this question I’ve given slightly different accounts of how I came up with the name. Most people assume the domain name has to do with my ego and vanity. I can assure you that is simply not the case. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Back in 2003 I was working with Patrick at a photo studio in Kansas City. We were discussing blogging and domain names. At that point I had probably owned a total of about 15 domain names (compared to today where I’m over 300). I wanted to start blogging about not only my marketing experiences, but also have a place for personal posts so that my family in Utah could read what I was up to. I had seen moderate success with people blogging through Blogger.com, but I didn’t feel comfortable letting a third-party store my writings. So I knew I needed a domain name of my own and would have to manage another website.

Patrick and I bounced a few ideas against each other for possible blog names. Since I was just getting started in SEO at the time, I knew I wanted it to have my name as a part of it. The domain JasonMurphy.com was taken, as were the .net and .org versions, so I needed an alternate. Patrick jokingly said “are you going to be a snob blogger and have The Jason Murphy Weekly Show?” (or something along those lines). This, of course coming from a guy who’s site is called Potty Mouth Pappy so you can imagine the type of ideas we had going back and forth. Half kiddingly I looked up TheJasonMurphyShow.com and since it was unregistered I grabbed it. I didn’t really mean to use it, but a few days later I decided it would be funny to actually setup a website on the domain and joke around at the studio with posts by me, about me, thus making The Jason Murphy Show an all “Jason Murphy” channel for news about, you guessed it, Jason Murphy!

So that’s how this whole thing got started. Yeah, kinda lame, right? A couple of weeks of joking around and I decided I might as well use the domain and site properly. I started over with serious content and let my family in Utah know about the site. Will it ever actually be a “show” per se? Probably not. But with the cost of podcasting so cheap, who knows, I might just feel like joking around again.

And that’s how TheJasonMurphyShow.com was born.

• Today is Day 6 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.