Use It or Lose It

When you set up a blog or a website, the first thing you do is decide what to name it. Since I wanted this to be called Suburban Rantings, I of course wanted the url to be suburbanrantings. blogspot.com. It wasn't available. I checked out the blog to make sure I wasn't unknowingly being a copycat, and discovered that the blog, called--I'm not kidding--Eschewing Obfuscation, has exactly one, one-sentence post dated Tuesday, August 26, 2003.

Then I tried sububurbanrants.blogspot.com. Unavailable. Checking it out, I was happy to see that it is actually called "Suburban Rants" but in a post dated January 1, 2008, the author announces that he's done blogging. Yet, the blog remains.

So, I wonder...how many hundreds of thousands of "dead" urls must there be out in cyberspace? Perfectly fine urls that could be put to good use but are UNAVAILABLE because someone once, for a second, thought they had a great idea for a website?

It seems like there should be a limit to how long you can hold on to a url (especially a free one) without doing anything with it. But then, what is that limit? A year? Two? With the lightning speed at which the internet changes, maybe it should be just a few months. I really have no idea--perhaps a little research is required.

Last year a girlfriend and I got a wild hair to hop on the environmental bandwagon and start some sort of "easy green" site. So the hunt for the perfect url began. We head to godaddy.com and start typing in names to see what's available. EasyGreen - taken. SimpleGreen - taken. SimplyGreen - nope. This went on and on and on; some sites were active, most were not. After a really, really long time, we found that OneGreenChange.com was available. Snag it!

Needless to say, we never developed the site. And the irony of this little tale? My friend continues to hold on to the url...although last time I looked it appeared to have been taken over by a Turkish Hacker. Really.