Gadgetopia

Mike Davidson posted an interesting article about his experience while trying to pick up an expired domain name.

So I placed a backorder through GoDaddy for $18.95 thinking that was all I needed to do. During the week that followed, I learned a lot about the domain expiration process. Two and a half months and $369 later, I am the proud owner of a shiny new domain. A really really good one.

This article will explain the domain expiration process and what you need to do in order to use it to your advantage.

Mike’s explanation of the process is interesting to me on two levels.

First, I’ve always wondered about the true value of a ‘good’ domain name. If you’ve got the best content on a given topic, your site will usually rise to the top of the natural search results, which is how most people find things anyway. When I need mop handles, I google for ‘mop handles’, I don’t randomly hit mophandles.com. Unless someone else had the name of my company, it would be hard to persuade me to pay much for a domain name.

Second, it’s always fascinating to me how engineers will put a system in place that makes good technical sense, but then someone will find some money in some aspect of it, and then build an entire economy around beating the crap out of it.

Via waxy.