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Boulevard of Broken .dreams
kubla2000 writes "Salon has a fascinating article up examining the detritus of the dotcom craze of registering anything and everything as a domain name. This is, by turns, a tragic and hilarious piece... there's an irrisistable pathos to the fact that "FreeRoofTile.com" has expired as well as an urge to take a clue-bat to whoever "thought" to register it in the first place."
Not the best article in the world. If there was any substance hidden in the 1000 something domain names, I didn't find it. The only interesting thing was that with "...Such emotion may well have lead to IDislikeRob.com, GordonIsAMoron.com, IHateAdamOliver.com, and HeatherThompsonIsABigDork.com" he missed the cultural significance of www.gordonisamoron.com. (A major cultural event from the Eighties in Britain. If you're 25-32, you'll probably have chanted this at schoolmates at some time in your life.) I'm wondering how much else he missed, and how many of the funny domains were automatically registered by automated robots.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
this article found at LATimes.com, 29 Jul 2002:
j sp?slug=la%2Dfi%2Dnetnames29jul29
http://www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.
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It is hilarious though...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Cute point.
And for a long time, salon.com was the site of some kind of resource for hairdressers (one that seemed to be pretty content light and coming soonish) and salon had to use salonmagazine.com. (That url still works, actually...they had better maintain it or the pornlords would swoop down.)
And "salon" isn't just a random name. It's an old fashioned term for a conversation group-- well, m-w.com says " a fashionable assemblage of notables (as literary figures, artists, or statesmen) held by custom at the home of a prominent person", but I remember the liberal rag Utne Reader was trying to start a kind of grassroots "salon revival", and I think this was a few years before the site, might well have been an inspiration for the name; there's overlap between the general feel of the two publications.
I'll miss Salon if it goes the way of Suck.com.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
You're closer than you think. Salon Magazine used to be stuck with the longer salonmagazine.com, and some hairstylist' collective site had salon.com. Then Salon Magazine worked out some kind of a deal to get the domain name, and they wandered off to salon.net or some such.
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