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(or, The Diary of a Confessed Caffeine Abuser)
What's In a Name?
By David "Spam Me and Die" Fiedler
Everything?
In some cultures (many in fantasy and science fiction), just knowing someone's true name can give you the power of life and death over them, so people there will only give their name to folks they trust absolutely.
On the Internet, nobody might know you're a dog, but if they know your domain name, who cares? The trick is getting your domain name in front of the public, if you're in business...by hook or by crook or by search engine.
Now, extend that idea from someone's personal name to their domain name. Do you own your own name on the Web?
It had never occured to me that it would be a good idea until a year or so ago. Suddenly I decided I had to own fiedler.com. Unfortunately, a cybersquatter had grabbed my last name, as well as thousands of others. I was forced to lease my own last name for my personal email and Web site. What the heck, it was only ten bucks a year.
Well, this year, when it came time to renew, the prices had gone up 300%. OK, that's only $30, but it's not the money, it's the principle of the thing (not to mention the rate of inflation). So I went to get davidfiedler.com. Gulp! Looked like another cybersquatter had taken it...after all, who'd want that domain but another person named David Fiedler (of which there are a few more on the net, admittedly)?
I gave the fellow at the other end of the Whois query a call, and I found out some interesting things. Perhaps it's the repetition in his own name that did this to him, but Dave Davidson is an admitted name freak. He's planning to legally change his name, as of the first day of the new millennium, to DaveDavidson.com. And the reason he's registered my name, apparently, is that it's on his personal list of "notorious top CEOs, celebrities and congresspeople". I'm sure I don't qualify as any of those last three "c" types, but I am certainly notorious (not to be confused with noteworthy)!
But his list isn't of pigeons to be bled dry of money with their own names held as hostage; rather, his plan is to transfer the domain names free to the appropriate people when they come knocking on his door to find out what's going on. Once I found out he already did this with Jim Barksdale, I relaxed (Barksdale has a lot more money than me, so if Davidson was after money, that's where he would have gone for it!).
There's a lot more to his plan, though. Davidson's dream is to allow everyone to register their name (or a popularly known version, such as AOL screen names like dodo106) as a domain name...free. Heck, he's already written a book on how important he feels this is (see yournameonline.com. With luck, he'll be able to work out the details, and then perhaps nobody will have to ask again, "So, where's your Web site?".
-- D. Fiedler
David Fiedler is Editor-in-Chief of WebDeveloper.com®, and his opinions are definitely his own.
Last modified: Thu Jun 15 06:22:22 EDT 2000
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