In a three page Article the Washington Post on the day it was purchased, chats about domain names and the new gTLD’s asking whether .com’s go by the way of horse and buggy, well actually “the party line” (which many of the readers never heard of)
“It’s funny, thinking about dot-com,” says Ben Zimmer. Zimmer is a linguist — he’s the executive producer of vocabulary.com — and he thinks a lot about the context and meaning of words. “Even though it still gets used, it’s most often used to refer to the original dot-coms of the late ’90s — the boom and bust. Perhaps for some time, it has had an almost nostalgic quality. It reminds you of that time.”
Now, “dot-com” is almost extraneous: ”
“Every business is a dot-com because every business has an Internet presence. There is a word for when this happens, for when technology moves forward more quickly than the words used to describe it, e.g., “dialing” a phone or “tuning” a radio. Linguists jokingly call them “anachronyms.”
“Dot-com, both the address and the phrase, taught us how to use the Web — how to think about the Internet as both a location and a categorized virtual space.”
“It was the training wheels for the bicycle we now comfortably ride. ”
Does this new expansion represent the end of the training wheels?
The end of the party line and the invention of . . . call waiting?
The time during which the Internet became something beautiful and matrixed, or the time during which it frazzled our brains with confusion?”
The article highlights a Pentagon contractor whom upon hearing about the new gTLD program took her lifelong savings and applied for .Wed
According to the applicant of .Wed “Lots of engaged couples want their own wedding sites, but the addresses they want aren’t available because other couples are already parked on them. Through the .wed domain, couples could purchase an inexpensive address — MarkandJessica.wed — for two years, long enough to see them married. After that, the site’s cost would drastically increase, pricing the couple out, leaving the space open for a new Jessica and Mark.”
While the pentagon contractor was the only applicant for .Wed there are three applications for .Wedding, which the story fails to mention.
Its an interesting read and you can read the entire article here
washington post? … WASHINGTON POST?
that bezos owned rag. i just subscribe for the sunday ads…
and the comics. i love the comics (except for nancy. her and that sluggo kid piss me
off no end.)
.wed?? Crash and burn.
.com training wheels?? Was the 1-800 training wheels to the 1-877 or the 1-866??
I don’t think so…
Its the end of the world – I am driving my suv off a mountaintop and hoping Zimmerman is not there to pull me out
> After that, the site’s cost would drastically increase,
> pricing the couple out
This is reason enough NOT to get a .WED domain name. As I mentioned in a post a couple weeks ago, I registered mine and my girlfriend’s name with a .COM extension in June. Two very common first names with an “and” between them. Available to be registered for $10. Still. Amazing.
.wedding is better than .wed
still, not everyone comparison price shops.. a ton of people dont.
i wouldnt have sold ANYTHING today if people on the internet comparison shopped better.
but thanks ebay and amazon.
.wed may as well be .wet – it is something significantly less that blockbuster .mobi – at best
Weddings speaking f things that aren’t everlasting
This Post at a DOT COM domain Blog
the URL article links to a DOT COM
her email address @ another DOT COM
amen amen.
“Training wheels”. For fucks sake what an incredibly stupid metaphor.
There is a reason why the ‘academician’ personality type is incapable of accomplishing anything of substance in the real world. They wind up having to work in colleges or as the Assistant Vice Assistant to the Head of Public Projects Resources Development because there are just so few working enviroments out there in the real world that advance theories over the plain truth.
Those people are awesome at fabricating scenarios and concocting narratives in support of their scenarios, they love going on TV and writing articles on publications talking all about it, but they fail to tether their ideas to reality and ultimately, when reality arbitrates what happens, they don’t understand why their ideas failed. It’s the Communism fallacy.
Its pointless to try and ‘explain’ why .com is what it is and how it relates to consumers. There are reasons, they are quantifiable, they can be articulated but its just pointless to try and persuade ‘theorists’ to ground themselves in what is, rather than what they’ve dreamed up as being theoretically optimal.
Many domainers squeal and whinge their standard book in ‘defense’ of .com; ultimately, they will wind up proven correct in spite of themselves and the the abysmal reasoning that under any other circumstances would’ve seen them straight into the poor house.
Interesting comment, @LSM.
But it’s a great article! I discovered it on another website via Bing, because I give equal time to Bing for research searches.
The author quoted ’80’s scientist who decided the original top level extensions for the article. It is an interesting read.
I prefer .wed to .wedding. More power to the individual who applied for that – hope it is a success! I’m surprised it was awarded to the person. If anyone can make an extension a success, it might be an outsider with her own ideas.
This new expansion represents the beginning of .Depends, or Oops I Pooped My Internet.
Novelty sells the news. Accuracy never. After all, that’s why it’s called the “news”.