Phil801 - Geek Blog

Well, I’m sure most of my readers know about del.icio.us there’s also mir.aculo.us and this weekend I heard about Fort.uitio.us (or something). This got me thinking about 2 things 1) That naming scheme is kind of popular and 2) We (Provo Labs) don’t have a domain like that and I wonder what’s available. I started poking around GoDaddy.com just playing with some ideas off the top of my head but nothing I tried was available. So for some reason I decided to get serious. I found this cool tool called AllWords.com that lets you look up words in multiple ways, including looking them up by ‘ends with’. So, I tried ‘ends with us’ and got about 280 results. I just knew I was going to find something good! So I started going through them, entering the middle syllable of each 3 syllable word I found. Things like ageo, turo, dextro, biguo, ocio, icio, etc. All in the TLD of .us. For the un-initiated, that means I was looking up things like ageo.us. I worked through the entire 280 word list and guess what: not ONE was availabe!!! I looked into the who-is and the site of several of them - nothing there. I think most of them were ‘domainers’ or people who buy up domains and just park them, hoping to sell them for a profit at some point.

Now, none of this is overly surprising - sometimes it takes me days to come up with a good, usable domain name that is available. Other times I just can’t figure one out. The interesting thing is that the .us domain is pretty much registered as far as the multi-syllable sub-domain meme goes. I cursorly played with some of the other TLDs like .de. Everything I looked for there was taken too. I found ONE good potential in the .at TLD that I want to talk to Blake about but he seems to have taken this whole Memorial Day vacation thing way too seriously he apparently pulled a Tim O’Reilly and managed to go off grid! Check out my personal blog to see what my idea of vacation time is!

So, if you’re thinking that doing something like del.icio.us would be fun - think again - it’s all over that way!! (unless you want to spend some dough)