A Rose.com By Any Other Name
Deciding upon a name in this day and age is tough. Choosing one is a relatively easier task.
Here is the problem. The cost of domains has dramatically declined over the past few years such that a rather curious opportunity arose for automated robots to mine the keyword inventory systems of Google and Yahoo looking for phrases that satisfied a formula of pricing and volume. If the keywords did, the robot then bought up the keywordPhrase.com and slaps search ads on it. The most famous example is greatbritain.com. Each name doesn’t have to earn a lot of money, just more than the $7/year it costs to maintain it.
A sad consequence means it is tougher to choose a name for new things that is available. Brontemedia.com (this site) is meant as a general holding place for my thoughts and in a corporate sense my interests. The real company name for my new venture I have been negotiating with a chap from Russia in the last month or so to buy. And I finally have.
So in the absence of a rooftop party unveiling the name of my new venture is homethinking.com. It is supposed to connote both the increasingly financially serious nature of real estate decisions but more so a play on the phrase "Home Cooking" because community is an integral component to everything it will do.
But enough about me. I would be curious to see if other people may have had the same problem with domain names, and wanted to pose this question: Were monopoly registers, in fact, good for the Internet?
I don’t know that they were necessarily good for the Internet, but it certainly made life a lot easier! So I guess for a given definition of “good” they were
The new system has probably improved life for the organisations who come up with new names, although sadly they all just use faux Latin and Greek words now so all re-brands sound pretty much the same.