Domain names don’t expire in a year. They last forever.

I’ve got a “portfolio” of around 50 domains myself, with only about a quarter of them in active use. The rest? Seemingly good ideas, possibly purchased while drinking, each representing something I had every intention of turning into the Next Big Thing. For at least an hour, anyway.

The problem is, I can’t just let them expire and let someone else have a shot. That’s because when they expire, odds are that they’ll get snapped up into someone else’s portfolio, except in this case it’s more of a traditional portfolio where people believe they’ll make money off it through a more proven model of camping and reselling.

And I don’t really have a problem with the practice. After all, most of the parked domains out there are still available, just at a higher price than you’d get them for at a registrar, and domains that are purchased that way might have a better chance of becoming actual products and services, since the buy-in commitment is higher. It just bums me out a bit that it’s getting harder to fuel my crack-like addiction to off the cuff registrations.

I know I’m not alone, so I’m proposing two developments to help deal with the problem.

The first: a drunk dial plugin. OK, nothing to do with drunk dialing, but inspired by the Gmail option that made you do math questions before sending messages late at night as a secondary “are you sure” mechanism.

This plugin would simply interrupt the registration process with a popup, remind you that by registering the domain, it’s forever, and ask you to make a commitment to actually do something with the idea. This commitment could actually be posted to a public registry where concerned members of the community could check in and audit your progress.

The second: the domain adoption service. There are real-world organizations that you can deed your land to so that when you die, it’s managed by a conservation agency (usually through a conservation easement) and won’t get turned into a mega mall. And of course, there are also real-world adoption agencies for humans. This would blend the two.

If you found yourself with a domain name that you can no longer take proper care of but really wanted someone to take it over who’d make it into something worthwhile, you could pay a small fee to have it transferred to the adoption agency – enough to keep it registered for a few years. Once there, prospective domainers would submit an application for what they want to do with it, certify that they won’t just park it with ads, and then they’d have a set amount of time to actually make good on their proposal before ownership reverts back to the agency.

Funding would come from the transfer fees, “adoption” fees, and probably sponsorship from some of the registrars out there.

Anyway, those are just some ideas I had after the tenth domain idea I looked up in a row came up parked. And realistically, I probably wouldn’t have done much with any of them anyway, which is why I didn’t go out and get domainadoptionservices.com just now (available as of Aug 26 2011.)

I’ve got some business-y posts lined up, but it’s Friday, I just got back from Mesh, so I’m both tired and thinking along these lines anyway, and I could probably insert 11 or 12 more excuses if I wanted, but I’m just going to go with this image that’s been in a browser tab for days because I can’t stop thinking about it:

First, the joke: it’s a still from Batman: The Animated Series, where a super-villain named Two Face is looking at a picture of what his life was like before he was horribly disfigured and went insane.  And apparently he has a credit or bank card under his super-villain name.

I’m a Batman fan, so I liked the humour here, but here’s the thing, it’s not a Photoshop job, as far as I know – I believe it’s a real still from the show.

Think for a moment about what just happened.

The show aired in the early nineties.  Back then, if you were home when it was on, you would watch it (fun fact, I once left an exam early to catch the show. Yes mom, I was done, had checked my work, got an A-, it was just a coincidence that the timing worked out but I like the story better the first, shorter, way, OK?)

If you weren’t home, you could tape it on your VCR, which probably would have been able to freeze frame on that image.

Then if you wanted to share the discovery, there were a few products out that could make a picture from your screen (I remember one that I think used Polaroid film,) but basically you’d have to take a physical picture of the screen, using a camera that tool film, either regular film or the aforementioned Polaroid instant stuff.

And then the only way you could share it would be to, what, fax it around?  By which point you might not even have a clear enough image for the joke to work – it’s been taped, paused, filmed, and then converted to black and white by now.  And how many people would you know who had both an interest in Batman and a fax machine?

That image was posted 3 days ago and according to imgur, it’s been viewed more than 8,000 times in the last 3 days, at broadcast-level resolution, and that’s just on this one site.  I don’t know the circumstances of the discovery, but someone could have spotted the joke, grabbed an image, and posted it in under 10 minutes, easy.

This is the stuff that I try to notice and acknowledge from time to time, but I have to limit it or my head will explode.

We’re living in a world where anyone over the age of eight can have a “back in my day” story, and that window’s shrinking every week.  How cool is that?

The Canadian government was recently ordered by a judge to make their websites accessible to the visually impaired, which surprised the hell out of me, because so many of their websites and programs are so painful to use, in my opinion, that I figured that they had to be that way to comply with someone’s misunderstanding of online accessibility.

Of course, I’m not terribly surprised that they’re appealing the ruling, though I’m disappointed in the potential precedent they might set by arguing that there are other ways to get at the information without using the internet.

To be clear, it’s 100% possible to make modern, efficient, and even attractive websites that comply with accessibility guidelines for the visually (and otherwise) impaired, especially for government sites, which aren’t exactly pinnacles of web 2.0 or gaming.

The thing of it is, if you’re applying for a federal grant that involves online work, they make accessibility mandatory.  That’s a requirements doc I pulled from a random government program (Heritage Canada in this case) but I’ve seen it before in client work proposals.  It doesn’t explicitly say accessibility, but when it says things like “All core website content and functionality must be accessible in any browser, although its presentation may vary… all users, regardless of their browser, must have access to the site’s basic content and functionality,” well, that’s kind of what this lawsuit was about…

It’s always kind of amusing to see companies and organizations get hit with their own rules, like when Bell Canada got nailed for violating the do not call list that they maintain or record labels being charged with piracy, but as I said earlier, I hope this appeal will get squashed, or better yet, never get filed.  Yes, I realize that it’s my tax dollars at stake, but it’s also a significant beachhead in the online space that needs to be protected.

Photo by Christian Heilmann.

It looks like IMDB has finally gotten a bit of a facelift, and there are some things I like about it, but I’ll be honest, it’s not working for me yet.  Good marketers and designers try to envision their product’s users as imaginary people so they can figure out the use cases and make sure the value’s there, but I guess I’m the odd one out for being the guy who just wants to see where else I know the actor from in a given movie or TV show.

Anyway, if they’ve got any money left in the development budget, here are my 5 wish list items:

Where have I seen that guy? Like I just said, I’m always going to the site to figure out where else I’ve seen an actor (I’m bad with faces but good with voices.)  They’ve added a “best known for” feature on the actor profile page, which helps, but would it kill them to put that in the cast list?  Don’t tell me it’s a scaling issue (and let’s put aside the rant about database-driven UI design,) just denormalize the sucker and move on.

Deep data. Why can’t I get a list of every actor who’s ever played an American President, and better still, can we break that down between fictional presidents and actual ones?  There’s some capacity for the concept of characters, but usually each president is a different one.  There are tons of queries like this that a basic cast and crew list just doesn’t cover.  Maybe tagging would help this, I don’t know.

The damned Kevin Bacon game. There’s got to be an exec in the company who keeps asking about this one.  Or maybe it’s the “don’t hire” flag in interviews because they’re tired of hearing about it. (And of course I mean the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game, not some weird version where he’s been damned to hell, though that would be something.)

Audio fingerprinting. Here’s my dream app: I’m watching something on TV, don’t know what it is (maybe the TV guide thing is down) or just want to pull the cast info in a hurry.  I fire up an app, it grabs a sound bite, and just like the music identification services, the movie gets identified.  Granted, probably not something in the current data set, but that would be cool, and if it could use that to tell where you are in a show, the commerce options would be amazing (click here to buy that gun Schwarzenneger’s using!)

An API. Sites that do valuable stuff with their data are more likely to provide APIs.  Sites that have DB in their name and are basically front end browsers tend to restrict data a lot closer.  C’mon IMDB, start the race! (I think they do have an API, or at least feeds, but it’s not cheap.  Amazon, which owns IMDB, probably provides a good chunk of what you’d need through their commerce API anyway.)

When IMDB came out, it was one of the maybe 5 reasons that the internet was actually interesting.  It’s probably still in the top 10, and the new facelift is nice and all, but I’d love to see it grow even further.

I’m having a lot of “lemonade moments” (um, that means finding the good in a less than optimal situation, not wetting myself) this week going through a bunch of stuff from my mom’s basement (every technologist who goes on and on about “near-infinite, near-zero cost storage in the cloud” probably has a few boxes stored away at his or her parent’s, and this needs to be considered at some point, if not in this post.)

Lots of old computer magazines, circa 1983 or so, many of which are now available online (so yes, thank you, near-infinite storage) but somehow that made things worse and I ended up looking up more junk while disposing of what I had.  One gem was Blip, the Video Games Magazine, published by Marvel Comics in 1983.  Big fonts, lots of filler, 36 pages, $1.00 US/$1.25CA.  Lasted 7 issues before folding, but kind of fun, in retrospect.

Here’s a snippet from issue 4′s always popular “consoles are going to turn into computers” article:

Now, a quick-yet-lazy search on Google doesn’t show any evidence that Tony achieved his dream, but I like this entry because it doesn’t involve balancing your checkbook (remember those?) but still highlights the desperate need for early hobbyists to find something to fill the “but what can you do with it?” question that, let’s be honest, most of us had a hard time answering with something other than “games.”

In a lot of ways, I’m seeing social media of modern times approach computer rationalization of the early ’80s.  It’s passing, slowly, but there are still a horde of mid-stage adopters who are still looking for something to justify their use of Twitter, FourSquare, etc.  Just like those days, there’s a layering in progress that almost mirrors applications over hardware – without social networks, things like the mobile/social coupon thing we talked about the other week would just be coupons, for example.

And this isn’t a new observation by any means.  Still, I’d love to see an elevator pitch that really took this concept to heart and went along the lines of “we make it so people have an excuse to use X.”

Oh, and I’ve yet to see a running website that hits what Tony was after, exactly (please let me know if you’ve got one,) but I thought this part from the same Blip article was worthy of comment:

Seven years later, the scripts that would form the basis of IMDB were born.  No mention of Chris, but for some people, in the early days of the internet, IMDB was almost a justification for internet access in itself.

One more thought for the day on the NY Times while I wait for a data report to generate…

As I mentioned earlier, I had to log in to their site today to read an article.  It was free, no huge deal, except that it’d been so long since I’d had to do it that I didn’t have a BugMeNot extension installed so I opted to reset my legit account.

And why had it been so long? Or had it? It really isn’t something I’ve tracked that much – I remember the days when I’d read Slashdot and scroll through the comments for the no-login link to whatever article it was (and for all the griping about the login, there were a LOT of NY Times stories being linked up), but in recent times I don’t recall having to log in at all.  Maybe I had a really old cookie.  Whatever.

When we’re in a time where the AP is trying to block websites from spreading its content, it’s worth a look at some of the media companies’ motiviations before dismissing them outright.  In the NY Times article’s case, while I didn’t go to BugMeNot, I’ll admit that the first thing I did was Google the opening sentence of the article.

I was a bit surprised by what came back.

There were about 267 results (I put quotes around the search.)

The article was only a few hours old.

And I don’t think the NY Times were in them at all.

What was in there was a ton of Adsense blogs – sites with the same headline, same opening quote that’s (I assume) available through RSS, plus the link to the story. Oh, and a ton of ads around the page.

These sites (the majority, anyway; I didn’t cick through and examine several pages of each) exist for one reason only, and that’s to make money off of people like me who are searching for the original article.  Some of us are trying to avoid a login, and some of us are just trying to find the original article, whether it’s on the source site or not.

But you know what?  This isn’t a Big Media problem.  Most bloggers have had the same thing happen to them.  It just happens less often, since our content, uh, kinda sucks sometimes.

Big Traditional Print Media might be whining a bit about Google News killing their business, but that’s not what’s happening.

It’s Google Adsense.

Think about the growth of the big search engine indexes.  Remember when they used to brag about them and compete amongst themselves over whose was bigger?

Do you really think that the internet’s near-geometric growth in number of pages would be anywhere near the path it’s been tracking if it wasn’t for automated feed-generated web pages plastered with ads?

I think there’s tons of room for bloggers and other web publishers to reuse existing content in a way that brings traffic and authority to the authors, but let’s be clear on who the targets are before slamming down claims of theft and/or walling off big chunks of the internet like it’s 1995.

Tom from the office (our office, not The Office) sent me a link to a NYTimes article about hyperlocal sites.  Surprisingly, I had to log in to the site to read it, which I don’t remember having to do in a while.  More on that in another post.

I hadn’t been tracking this area in a while, mostly because 1) most of these efforts are for US cities, and 2) most of them suck, so it was a good chance to see where things were going at a high level.

Sadly, not much has changed, and it’s a bit unfair to say they suck, but the thing of it is that it’s hard enough to get an audience of dedicated early adopters for a given subject area, but adding geographic constraints to the problem makes it even harder.

An analyst named Greg Sterling has a good quote in the article that explains a lot of the core problem: “When you slice further and further down, you get smaller and smaller audiences… Advertisers want that kind of targeting, but they also want to reach more people, so there’s a paradox.”

And it’s not just advertising, content suffers the same issue.  At the moment, the people who want to read this kind of site are the exact same people who are working to feed it.

So let’s allow for the time machine to zip forward to a point where any given neighbourhood has a thousand voices and ten thousand readers (hey, will these numbers happen anywhere outside of a condo farm?) – what’s the difference going to be between something like this and the local community paper?  We have one in our neighbourhood, the area it covers keeps growing, and it’s biased as anything else you can imagine. The loudest voices are going to win here, just like anywhere else.

Here’s an upside for a Monday: yes, I think these things will all fail, at least in their current approach.  That said, I think a lot of great lessons are going to come out of it, a lot of new features and gizmos are going to spin off, and in the meantime, maybe I’ll find out what’s up with that pothole across the way.

If you haven’t heard of TinyURL yet, it’s one of the original URL shortening services that can take a really long URL and make it into a really short one.  The link goes to their server and redirects to the actual destination.  It’s handy for emailing long links which might get corrupted with word wraps, and I use it a lot when I post to Twitter to keep under the 140 character limit.

They’ve had this neat feature for a while where you can give your post a custom alias, which means, instead of http://tinyurl.com/d39dm you can have http://tinyurl.com/booger (I just typed those in the post editor, haven’t clicked on either, never will, totally made up examples, etc)

This morning I wanted to post a Tweet about a news story and I figured I’d give it a custom alias so followers would have a hint as to what it’s about.  For reasons I’ll get to in a second, I won’t go into what the story was (you can follow me to find it, I suppose), but the alias I’d chosen was already taken.  Since it was a pretty topical alias I typed it in to see if someone had found a better story.

Nope, it was porn.

That’s right, people are squatting on tinyURL aliases now.  Cheaper and faster than registering domain names, I guess, and they don’t expire.  I just wonder if that means that a lot of people are already typing in URLs on speculation to the service, or if it’s a trend that people on the edge have spotted.  Since the link was to porn (hence the lack of an example), and porn is generally a leader when if comes to technology, there might be something to this.

Just in case: http://tinyurl.com/jasondoucette

I did a quickie (and slightly cryptic) post a little while ago comparing old school comic book ads to Google Ads, but a post on Boing Boing about a man who bought a monkey via a comic ad got me to thinking some more.

No, I’m not about to go out and buy a monkey anytime soon, but I really think that Google’s advertising program is this generation’s version of the random comic ad, times a million – the barriers to entry are nearly nonexistent, the content can be equally ridiculous, and really, there’s only one tragic piece missing: years from now, how are we going to review this time in history?

Assuming some group out there is keeping track of a portion of the ads out there, which I doubt, there’s a whole new component of interactivity that’s missing.  I don’t just want to know that someone advertised an eBay affiliate link for African Slaves (OK, in that case I don’t really want to know at all), I want to know what keywords led to what ads which led to what pages.

I want an Internet Archive for advertising, really.  Who’s keeping track of the classic banners of days past?  If this is the era of advertising-supported content, how will that be reflected in our archives of this particular time?

Of course, I don’t know what the Archive’s future is either, as things get more and more AJAXy and data driven.  There’s less and less value that comes from scrapers these days as more and more content comes from embedded script and object tags.  It’s kind of a shame, but I don’t expect (or particularly want) “we can’t archive it” to be a design constraint on innovation moving forward.

In 20 years, will we get nostalgic for nostalgia?