When Hugh Hewitt asked me on the air this afternoon to give the URL for the Shark Blog, I fumbled through double-you-double-you-double-you dot usefulwork dot com slash shark. This prompted Lileks to write in the previous entry's comments "Now get a shorter URL!"
Yes, this blog's URL is awkwardly long. And in fact, I tried to get a shorter URL. When I called Hugh's program a couple of weeks ago, he told his listeners to go to sharkblog dot com. Well of course that's where any normal person would think to look for the "Shark Blog". But you won't find the Shark Blog at sharkblog.com because I never bothered to register that domain. This is just a hobby, I have a URL that works, so why bother to spend more money on yet another fancy domain? It's not like I'm losing any paying customers because potential readers have to go to the extra trouble of googling for "shark blog" to find me instead of typing in sharkblog.com.
But once Hugh Hewitt starts instructing his listeners to visit sharkblog.com, I can't let him down, can I? So I went to register sharkblog.com, but ... it was already taken!
Some customer of a hosting company called "midPhase Services" owns sharkblog.com and midPhase won't even tell me who it is. They're not doing anything with the domain yet except posting a "coming soon" message. There can't be many people who would want to own the domain sharkblog.com, except perhaps the people who operate the Live Journal "SharkBlog" (I beat them to the name by a good two years) Or maybe the Seattle Post-Intelligencer took the name just to get under my skin.
In any event, I now own sharkblog.org and sharkblog.net.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 12, 2004 10:49 PMNot to be a nudge, but sharkblogger.com is available.
Posted by: Lileks on October 13, 2004 12:02 PMI hate outfits and people that do that. Some ratbag took the LiveJournal name "toren" and never used it.
Posted by: Toren on October 13, 2004 12:28 PMBRAVO on the Hugh Hewitt appearance! Its nice to have a top-tier blogger in the Northwest, getting some much-deserved recognition.
Posted by: Seth Cooper on October 13, 2004 02:17 PM"Or maybe the Seattle Post-Intelligencer took the name just to get under my skin."
LMAO......I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm similarly bummed that Spoons.com is taken.
TSE.com is gone too. It belongs to the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Posted by: Spoons on October 18, 2004 08:48 AMHey, some rat bastard took the name "Slartibartfast" and hardly ever uses it. Life's unfair all over.
Posted by: Slartibartfast on October 19, 2004 06:47 AM