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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."
Otherwise you can apply all of the standard economic models recently applied to tulips, beanie babies, cabbage patach dolls, etc.
Who registered that damn Goatse site!
Take the site: civilwarbattles.com. My friend's 13 year old son had to do a school report on the civil war, so my friend suggested they look there. Check it out yourself..then explain what this has to do with the civil war..and why the site owner is so irresponsible in his posting of porn there.
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
One thing I noticed happening a couple of years ago was that as soon as a domain with even a minimum amount of traffic or visibility in search forums expired, it was quickly purchased by a porn site.
At one time, no doubt, that was a valid site about civil wars, but the domain owner let it expire, and it was snatched up because it probably came up high on a search engine for it's term.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that several of the larger porn site chains either have deals with several domain registars to let them move in pretty quickly on bulk expired domain snatching, or that there's a small company out there that makes money with scripts that watch for new domain expirations, then checks to see what their google.com ranking is, calculates a set fee based on potential "accidental traffic" from people going to the site and then offers a large number of such site names to a porn chain.
Just more reason for me to go to google first for whatever I'm looking for, rather than bother with a "search by typing a term as a domain". And yet another reason why domain names are rapidly losing their value based on their name.
Odd that she mentioned thepenismightier.com, since a version of it it is a fairly thriving site, and they like the ambiguity of the name.
One my favorite tech info resource sites has to have a dash in its name, otherwise it might look like "expert sexchange" instead...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Probably from this old Saturday night live skitAlex Trebek: Mr. Connery, why don't
you pick?
Sean Connery: Ah! Well met! I'll take Months That Start With Feb, Trebek.
Alex Trebek: For how much?
Sean Connery: Suprise me, you filthy bastard!
Alex Trebek: Okay, that's completely unnecessary. Months That Start With Feb for $800. This is the only month that starts with Feb. [ Sean Connery buzzes in ] Mr. Connery?
Sean Connery: Febtober!
Alex Trebek:No. [ Calista Flockhart buzzes in ] Calista Flockhart.
Calista Flockhart: What is.. Febturday?
Alex Trebek: No.
Sean Connery: She said turd!
Alex Trebek: I hate you! The answer was February. That's the month that starts with Feb. It was last month!
Sean Connery: Aha! A trick question!
Alex Trebek: Yeah, it was a trick question, Mr. Connery. Why don't you pick a category?
Sean Connery: I've got to ask you about the Penis Mightier.
Alex Trebek: What? No. No, no, that is The Pen is Mightier.
Sean Connery: Gussy it up however you want, Trebek. What matters is does it work? Will it really mighty my penis, man?
Alex Trebek: It's not a product, Mr. Connery.
Sean Connery: Because I've ordered devices like that before - wasted a pretty penny, I don't mind telling you. And if The Penis Mightier works, I'll order a dozen.
Alex Trebek: It's not a Penis Mightier, Mr. Connery. There's no such thing!
Nicholas Cage: Wait, wait, wait.. are you selling Penis Mightiers?
Alex Trebek: No! No, I'm not.
Sean Connery: Well, you're sitting on a gold mine, Trebek!
No Zen is good zen
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you chose Curtain No.1. Fact is, you'd have to; the Web site Salon.com doesn't exist -- never did, so far as I can tell -- and the domain name expired on April 12. But the very fact that Salon.com has expired means that someone, maybe a year ago, maybe two, registered it. Someone out there, someone living among us, chose to bet that the road to online success would be paved with women who wanted their hair colored online.
The arrogant fools.
GreatDomains (a Verisign acquisition) is a joke. As I've mentioned previously, there's a huge difference between asking prices (often five figures) and actual sales prices (a few hundred dollars). Right now, you can probably buy almost any unused domain on the Internet for under $200.
Back when there was the big push for additional top-level domains, I pointed out that they were unnecessary. And, in retrospect, we didn't need ".biz", or ".info"; we had ".com" and ".net", and they did the job. Having more TLDs was just a moneymaker for registrars, not something useful.
It's all Esther Dyson's fault. She insisted, when she headed ICANN, that there had to be more TLDs, and that whether there should be more TLDs wasn't open to discussion. She was wrong.
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.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I would think that Ceilinghooks.com was an artistic bondage site.