Blog Number 78

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

Flipping through the channels tonight I came across televangelist Richard Roberts (son of Oral Roberts).  I had the TV on mute so I am not sure what he was saying but I did notice that across the bottom of the screen was their ministry's website - orm.cc.  I had never heard of a website ending in .cc so I had to ask Mr. Google to see what info he had for me.  Turns out that the .cc domain belongs to the Cocos Islands.  I had heard of a few countries that were selling domain names with their country extensions (the United States has .us, Canada has .ca, France has .fr, etc - complete list is here) but the only one I had heard of that was actually making a profit was the .tv domain (belonging to the country of Tuvalu) for obvious reasons.  That country just plain got lucky when it came to 2 letter domain assignments.

Anyway, some dude in Seattle originally procured the rights to sell domain names ending in .cc.  I looked and indeed orm.com is taken (by something called Pope Resources).  So if you are Oral Roberts Ministries, what are you gonna do?  If you want to see if your domain name is taken, you can go to the .cc domain site and do a search.

Another way that I know of to get close to your domain is to typo-squat.  Typo-squatting is where you register a domain that is a typo of a more popular site (like microsfot.com or micorsoft.com or micrdsoft.com for instance).  Of course I am the only person I know that finds this fascinating.  Microsoft has a site set up to track this kind of thing actually.

Isn't this fascinating? Aren't you glad you read my blog today?  By the way, someone registered xanga.cc already.  But according to the small print on the right side of the xanga.cc home page, it is for sale for the bargain price of $9,999.00.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon