How many times have you bought a domain? There’s something special about that moment when an idea, brilliant or crazy, becomes worthy of registration. It’s a next level of commitment towards making the idea reality. We often ask our friends about their bought (and usually unused) domains, and hilarity ensues. We’ve decided to share via a new series on this blog, “Five Domains”.
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This week’s guest is Paul Ford, self-described “writer and nerd currently working as a content strategist, advisor to Readability, partner in SoMuchAwesome.com, and updates Ftrain.com every now and then.”
Says Paul:
“When God closes a door, he registers a domain name. I own a fairly modest 32 domains (some of them shorteners for the other domains), mostly purchased late at night during moments of fevered hope or high amusement. It’s hard to pick favorites, but here are a few…”
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1 Copywire.com
My first business website, now nearly 12 years old. Did you need a freelancer to open a spreadsheet and write promotional copy for 700 specific brand attributes of strollers, or synthesizers, or consumer energy products? Then you’ve called (on a landline, assuming the modem wasn’t tying up the line) the right fellow. I knew I needed an edge, so I called myself a “Content Strategist.” That’s how I could bill not $25, but $30, an hour. So if anyone ever asks you, “What is content strategy?” one answer is, “$5 more an hour than copywriting.”
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2 GratefulPublic.com
In 2009 there was a grand flowering of tiny social-marketing-focused strategic web consultancies, and I wondered: How hard can that be? A half-hour with some JavaScript and [grateful public] (lowercase, brackets, not serious) was open for business. In order to keep it just like all those other consultancy websites, I never updated it.
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3 CommentsAreClosed.com
A single-serving site that allows one to say, gently, that comments are closed (appending a name to the URL personalizes the message). This is part of a suite of sites I’d love to build someday that tell people to please, please, please shut up.
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4 MediumRectangle.com
Because the medium rectangle 300×250 pixel banner ad completely dominates online publishing, and is a critical component of our
wonderful web of remnant networks, lousy clickthroughs, and content farms, I think it would be nice to celebrate the good work that people have done using this awful unit (really!). In my dreams the entire site will itself be a single 300×250 banner, and embeddable as a banner, of course. Stories, poetry, animated GIFs, and, of course, ads. Given that my business partner is a master of banners, this might actually happen. -
5 Deploud.com
I was working on a project and we were approaching our deadline. “It’s time to deploy,” someone said. “To deploy…to the cloud!”
“Deploud!” I said. “We’re going to deploud!”
Then I thought. “Well, I’d better buy that domain name, just in case.” And here we are. It expires May 22, and it’s yours if you want it.
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SavePublishing.com (Bonus Domain!)
I bought this years ago and I keep renewing it. Everyone has ideas but no one wants to commit. “Maybe it could be a blog,” they say. “Or something about books? Oh wait, it could be about community. Or e-readers.” The inability to commit tells you something about the industry, I think. I’m going to hold onto it for as long as publishing survives, then let it expire. Right now it’s set to expire in 2012.