With San Francisco trying hard to redirect the tech sector's focus away from Silicon Valley, a new branding effort coming out of the SoMa's techie hivemind is pushing to re-brand the neighborhood as "Cloud Corridor."

Rather than a concerted push by local real estate agents, this latest neighborhood re-naming effort comes from the tech ilk themselves — in this case the 50 or so companies who make their business "in the cloud." (The nebulous "cloud," in case you've been living under an iRock in the eForest, is basically just what we used to refer to as "The Internet" except there are apps involved.)

The Examiner's Joel Engardio explains the appeal of a fluffy new name:

A dozen San Francisco-based cloud companies met recently to strategize how to get Cloud Corridor into the lexicon. While some are competitors, all would benefit from the common branding. Human resource teams were most excited about using the name to recruit engineers and cloud talent for an experience, not just a job. [...]

Each company promotes the Cloud Corridor in their own marketing efforts. They also try to influence the media and elected officials to say “Cloud Corridor” when referring to San Francisco’s tech industry. They’re hopeful, considering Ed Lee is already known as the “tech mayor.”

If "Cloud Corridor" sounds insufferable, it's because the "The Cloud" is just a trendy marketing term to begin with — one that has suddenly become so ubiquitous it hardly means anything. Earlier this year, the term really became a joke when a developer created app to turn every "Cloud" reference on the internet to "Butt." When you think of SoMa as the "Butt Corridor," it actually kind of makes sense.

On the other hand, at least the marketing team spared us the citywide moniker of "Cloud City," apparently because no one wanted to bother asking George Lucas for the rights. Then we really would have been a Mickey Mouse town.

[SFEx]