Name your plugin after yourself. If you have a name for it already, add your name to the beginning or the end. This will make your name stand out, make your plugin more recognizable and it will build your reputation for you. This is a suggestion for all plugin developers participating in the WordPress Plugin Competition and is applicable, in my mind, to almost every other non-mainstream mod/fix/plugin.
I understand that every project and/or program cannot be named after the developer. I doubt that a project like Mozilla could ever (or should ever) be named after a single developer. However, consider the following example. Do you know who Steve Minutillo is? A lot of you might know of him already because of FOF, but I would wager that an even larger number of you have never heard of him. A project like “Feed on Feeds” would work perfectly fine as “Minutillo’s Feed on Feeds” and Minutillo’s name (and his reputation) would be more widely recognized.
Conversely, it will become mighty cumbersome (albeit, annoying) if every plugin developer named every one of their plugins after themselves. Reserve your judgement and make an intelligent decision. If you believe that this is the plugin of all plugins and is going to win the Congressional award for plugin bravery, by all means call it *insert handle here*’s God-Mode plugin for WordPress. I can only provide examples from my own experiences and I am never sure which release is going to be a hit, but I spend quite a bit of time naming my code and my work. I now wish I had thought of “LaughingLizard’s Narchives” or “Pictorialis LaughingLizardus” before releasing them! 🙂
[EDIT] Matt (in the comments) is right. Doing this just might prevent some collaboration between plugin authors. However, it is still something to think about.
I’m mixed about this, part of the goal of the repository is to encourage more collaboration between plugin authors, which I think this would hinder to some extent.
It depends on the plugin. I named Touched “WordPress: Touched” because it was much more about additional WP functionality than a specific customisation by myself.
Customisations, and to some extent spam plugins, suit that naming convention, but many plugins won’t.
I agree though — it is a simple and easy way to get your name out there.