I’m starting to wonder if there shouldn’t be some kind of use-it-or-lose it rule on domain names.
Before I consolidated my blogs onto the Sparkplug 9 domain, and moved off my old gilgamesh.ca domain, I looked hard at the alternatives.
Something that had some kind of connection to my name would have been nice. So I started going through all the combinations:
- jk.ca: parked at 1 and 1
- jak.com: taken by a legit company
- jk.com: taken by a squatter
- koetsier.ca: who can spell koetsier?
And so on … until I had racked up a list of probably 10 or more domain names that would have made sense given my name – most of which were not actually being used for any particular website at all. Just parked, with ads on them, pop-unders for the unwary, and offers for online gambling, etc.
Not cool.
Apparently there’s gold in squatting on domain names. I just wonder if allowing that business is worth the inconvenience any company or individual has to go through these days to get a website.
Because so many domain names are taken by squatters, legit sites looking for a home on the web end up with names like Ookles and 37blah, 92whatevers, and 4somethings. Or orange monkey (OK, I made that one up).
Of course, from such hassles we also get wonderful constructions like del.icio.us, and histori.ca.
Hey there,
I’m sorry you feel we’re squatting. I’m the founder of Ookles and we’re really not squatting imho. We’ve got a web service under development and we’ve missed our internal ship deadlines several times and we are racing to get it done.
My apologies for frustrating you.
Take care
Scott
Not at all, Scott – sorry for the misperception!
I’m aware that you’re not squatting. My point is that the name of your service is umm … how can I say this nicely … a little out of left field.
Why? I’m guessing it’s mostly because so many domain names are taken by squatters.
I’ll update the article to be more clear.