About two years ago I rediscovered the Japanese Pop Group Shonen Knife, and was listening to the chorus of the song Riding the Rocket. There was a word that got repeated, and it took me several attempts to find it in a Japanese-to-English dictionary. [1]

The word turned out to be 浮かぶ which is commonly transliterated as "ukabu" which means "floating"; once I discovered this word, I heard it being used a lot in spoken Japanese, and saw it could be used in the following contexts:

• An astronaut weightless in space
• Floating in a pool
• The feeling one might have dancing or jumping on a trampoline
• The feeling one might have while daydreaming or on the edge of sleep

The domain name ukabu.com was already taken, yet I saw that speakers of English would hit the vowels right in "ookaboo". I figured that Japanese people mangle English words all the time and the least I could do is return the favor.

Working on Ookaboo, I was struck by the dematerialization involved -- I could capture photographs of things all around the world with very little physical hardware. I didn't need a satellite or a truck. It was clear early that places were going to play an important role, so the project as a whole was a form of "space exploration." The theme of weightlessness came up again and again.

Up until this point, I'd chosen names for sites based on keywords: animalphotos.com, carpictures.cc, and ny-pictures.com. I believed that those keywords would help my sites in the search engine rankings, but I'd notice that often the #1 site didn't have a keyword.

Looking at companies that get mentioned on TechCrunch, it seemed like I'd need to have a frivolous name to get taken seriously, so it was "ookaboo".

[1] It seems Naoko Yamano, pictured, the lead singer of Shonen Knife, has a similar approach to western culture (see Jackalope.)

(Thanks to Audrey Sel for the photo, which is available under a CC-BY-SA/2.0 license)