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Calling out the .com in familygreenberg.com

By Brian | February 18, 2011 | Share on Facebook

My buddy Jeff Porten name checked me (domain-checked me?) in his TidBITS article yesterday, so I figured the least I can do is respond with some thoughts of my own.

First of all, if you’re here visiting from TidBITS, welcome! Have a look around. Stay awhile. I’ve got this really cool Photoshop celebrity contest going on called Brain Celebri-teasers which could always use some fresh faces. And while it hasn’t appeared that way lately, I do occasionally write, you know, WORDS.

Now that we’ve taken care of the formalities, on to Jeff’s topic about top-level domains (TLD’s). He speaks of the .nxt conference, at which various marketing people are trying to convince the world that hershey.candy would sell more chocolate bars than hershey.com. He then asserts that most people surf the web with Google these days anyway (even finding www.google.com using their Google search bar), making the TLD an anachronism of that ancient animal known as the “90′s Web.”

I don’t disagree with him. Owning familygreenberg.com

Topics: Tech Talk | 5 Comments »

5 Responses to “Calling out the .com in familygreenberg.com”

  1. Dashworlds says at February 18th, 2011 at 6:32 pm :
    Hello

    Visiting via TidBITs….Just to let you know, your link on comments section isn’t clickable (or copyable)……suggest adding note that a clickable link is in the body TidBITs article…it saved me a lot of time and typos :)

  2. Brian says at February 19th, 2011 at 2:24 am :
    Done!

    Thanks for the tip, Dashworlds…

  3. Thomas says at February 20th, 2011 at 2:55 pm :
    Brian, you mentioned “the world

  4. Brian says at February 21st, 2011 at 12:52 am :
    @Thomas: apologies if I wasn’t clear. I was referring to the need to put content in the expected places.

    With new TLD’s, an expectation will be set – all adult material should be in the .sex domain; all music should be in the .music domain, etc. If someone puts pornography on a .music page, there’s nothing really stopping them, except that when people find that page (be it through Google or any other method), they will likely click away quickly, avoid linking to it from their own pages, or otherwise indicate their disappointment. This lowers the pages PageRank, causing it to drop lower in Google search results.

    Assuming the purveyor of that material doesn’t want that to happen, then he is encouraged (through the activity of the masses) to move his content to the expected place. Just like nasa.com used to display adult content (for people who accidentally went there instead of nasa.gov), and no longer does.

    I hope that clears it up…

  5. Jeff Porten says at March 1st, 2011 at 4:41 am :
    I don’t expect you’ll see any enforcement of hierarchy in the new TLDs — that kind of Internet went away in the early 1990s. The problem with having different sites at britneyspears.music and britneyspears.com is that Britney has to hand over control to the people who run the .music TLD to do this — and in terms of brand management, that’s the last thing you want to do.

    Or, just airballing, let’s say I decide to use new TLDs to embark on a project I’ve been meaning to do for years, splitting up jeffporten.com content into various channels. Even if Apple lets me have jeffporten.apple as a nice gesture to its developers, what have I gained? Better question, what are the odds that jeffporten.apple will be allowed to point to a section of my WordPress site, instead of Apple’s own webhosting features?

    Finally, the content blocking is exactly why .sex and .xxx isn’t going to work. Sure, many companies will set up shop there, but they’re *also* going to put their content in .com, .org, .tv, and .anywhere-else where they can get eyeballs. Whitehouse.com was a great place to put pornography back in the days when they were still trying to get the point across that you *could* find porn on the web — and yes, Virginia, there was a time when they had to train their audience. Now they have different ways of essentially being a shrink-wrapped Hustlers behind the 7-11 counter — which is teenager-friendly (well, not to the actual teenagers), as well as a point-of-sale impulse purchase.

    I didn’t think of this analogy in time for the article, but domains are nearly as irrelevant as IP addresses — and like IP addresses, publishers can assign as many domains as they like to reach their content. Call me shocked if any of it makes a difference; the sole exception I can see is that Unicode domains in foreign languages will be impossible to reach by users who don’t even know how to type those characters on their keyboards. But that’s also just an extension of the language barrier; I never land on a Chinese site with Roman character names, either.

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