Chp 352. Goodbye illusionaire

After eight years of blogging, it is with a heavy heart that I bid my blogging name “illusionaire” adieu. For the sake of consistency and to avoid any further confusion, my blog name will now be just Mizohican, the same as my blog url.

I started my blog as illusionaire back in 2004 with mizohican as my url. As I have described here in this post The story behind your (online) name:

illusionaire: This was a name I coined from the words illusion and legionnaire – hence illusionaire – A “Dream trooper”, a warrior well-versed in the mystic arts of illusion and black magic. I’ve always been fascinated by phantasmagoria and the supernatural, and I used to have a large collection of comics with fantasy-based themes. I wanted my writings to deliver just that. Hence, illusionaire.

I was happy being illusionaire. It was not a common name, and it gave me a new identity.

But we all know how unpredictable the internet is. Things that were popular before, soon became passé in no time. New technology pops up every day, and we have to constantly keep up with what’s going on around us.

Likewise, many popular social networking sites and community platforms came up, and the url you have chosen for those sites usually becomes the name of your site too. Twitter, posterous, tumblr, facebook, last.fm, foursquare, youtube, skype, mashable etc etc… I am known as Mizohican in all those sites, simply because my url is also Mizohican.

Hence that is why, after much consideration, I will no longer use the name “illusionaire” on my blog and will be just Mizohican from here on.

Now I have just two online identities –
* Sandman – for all Mizo specific sites
* Mizohican – for the rest.

Having a consistent online name is important. You don’t want to be called by different names at different sites if you want to be recognized or make an impact. At the same time, having a unique name is very important too. You don’t want to share that same “nick” with other people. Both illusionaire and Mizohican are very unique. “Sandman” is not, but then, I use this only at Mizo centric discussion forums.

I never use my name “Kima” online because it is a very common Mizo name. There must be at least a thousand Kimas who are regularly online.

With a name like “Mizohican” I can go to any new sites (like “Quora” recently) and I have no issue registering a new account because the username “Mizohican” will always be available.

So without further ado, goodbye illusionaire.