Naming projects

How the … do people come up with names for companies and projects. I don’t get it. It seems that I can come up with a name in two ways:

1. Grab the first that comes into my mind and go with that even though it blows. Notetagger ?! Cmon, Jakob, surely you can do better…
2. Spend forever pondering synonyms, combinations, puns, making endless lists and evaluating, scrapping, thinking, reconsidering, and eventually end up deciding that I can’t come up with a name that works. Gah!

To top it all off, I’ve found a criteria that’s perfect for figuring out if the name I’ve come up with is good enough: The domain name is taken. For all worthwhile top level domains.

Sigh.