I don't sense any dark connotation for the word. I've seen it used most often in a pretty value-neutral way to describe any group of people living outside their country of origin. These days most diaspora are composed of economic emigrants who have left their homelands voluntarily in search of opportunity.

It's also the title of a very good science fiction novel that I would say treats the word without negative connotations.

Amazon probably seemed like a ridiculous name when they started out... why would you name an online bookstore after a South American river? But I think they've done okay.

Though this only really works if you're doing something orthogonal to the original word and build enough of a brand to make it stick.

And we all remember the reaction when Nintendo announced that the Revolution's official name was "Wii". I still think it sounds silly, but it's no longer weird.

According to Bezos' biography he was looking for a name that started with 'A' to rank high in the web portals of the time and also he liked the idea of being 'big'.

Could you explain this dark connotation? Having seen it used in publications of varying quality, I have sensed no such thing.

It has pretty common connections to the Jewish Diaspora during and after World War II. While it's not as common a usage as "the Holocaust", among many folks (especially those with a little knowledge of 20th century history), "the Diaspora" refers first to the Jewish one.

The definition I'm familiar with for Jewish Diaspora (which is corroborated by all the Google hits on the first page) is the dispersal of the Jewish people starting in the 6th century BCE. Where do you get the connection to World War II?

I wonder to what extent this is actually true, and to what extent it's a meme that's grown around (the social network called) Diaspora. I've spent a fair amount of time with people who are part of the Jewish and Zimbabwean diasporas, and I've never picked up on a "dark" vibe to the word. And, as decode points out, the Jewish diaspora refers primarily to the ancient Jewish exile and dispersal from Palestine, not to 20th century history. I see the word more as a part of Jewish culture and tradition that's if anything celebrated, but Jewish readers are welcome to tell me I'm being crass and culturally insensitive.

I have a bond with naturally occurring English words as product names. I don't think they should apologize, or feel bad for having a name that people don't know.

I would HOPE that people would learn from it, and end up with a slightly better vocabulary, and be thankful for it.

On the flipside, it's NOT a commonly used word, so SEO for it (at least for the name) should be drop dead easy. A search for Diaspora should contain either a wiki link to a disambiguation page, or an article about them. That's about as good as you can hope for, SEO wise, though I obviously have to concede that the name fails the obvious pronounceability test, but as more and more of our interactions are relegated to clicks, that's becoming less of an issue than it used to be.