The actual name is ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah, "Islamic State". The Arabic acronym Daesh ("D.S.") is considered derogatory by IS itself.

I didn't know the name "Isis" had actually seen its popularity affected that much in the US? It still feels like a beautiful classical name to me, but then we never used the English name "ISIS" for the organisation, here in France.

It's a shame that the multimillenial name of an ancient god could be ruined for some people by an organization that lasted less than a decade, I hope this effect doesn't last.

My friend has a 10 year old daughter named Isis.

"Al Qaeda" can be translated as "The Foundation", and there is apparently some discussion about Bin Laden being an Asimov fan and basing the name of his organisation on the Foundation Series. Also, I am reliably informed that wiping your Al Qaeda has apparently become slang in some places.

No, it's more to do with the ambiguity of the Arabic original ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām. The "Sham" bit here can be refer either to the present day state of Syria, hence ISIS; or the historical greater Syria aka Levant, hence ISIL. However, the group internally dropped the qualified some time ago, now it's just Islamic State, with the obvious implication that it's the global state for true believers.

Wikipedia goes into all this in detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Islamic_State_of_...

There was a tweet about the poor NSA intern who would be tasked with the code to identify whether "is" referred to the organization or the verb. The paranoid side of me always assumed that the rebranding to Isis could have been suggested by the Pentagon to news organizations for that reason.