Asymptomatic

When I looked at my GoDaddy account last night, I was sure I've been on crack for the past year - 39 domains. And those are just the ones at GoDaddy. Surely there must be some projects I'm "working on" that people don't know about. Let's see what I can share.

Before I go on let me say this: Will someone please redesign GoDaddy's site? kthxbye

Read the rest →

I was just poking around looking at some domains today, and checked in on the .com version of this site. I know it's been squatted on for some time, and I'm always shocked at how much money they're asking for it. Who else is going to want that domain but me, and who do they really expect is going to pay $7088 for it? That's crazy.

Is there no way we can fairly determine who is squatting on a domain and make them stop? There's this whole (I'll call it) black market of people selling domains that they're not going to use for anything except to extort money from people who could put them to good use. Apart from BuyDomains.com, there's that awful site Sedo.com, that encourages regular people to do the same thing. It's horrible. I have a very low opinion of people that make money this way.

Read the rest →

I've been advertising with Google for a while, and I've added a few domains to my competitive ad filters over the years. I recently got a message from the AdSense folks telling me that I shouldn't exclude those domains because they monetize well on my site. I don't know why. Let's take a look:

blogger.com

- Probably does well because my site is often returned as the top entry for many "blogging" search terms.
datingfly.com - The first of a handful of dating sites to plaster their fannies on my site, I wouldn't trust getting a date to the looks of this site, nor do I like the idea of hawking "love services" from my blog. Seems kind of skeezy.
perfectmatch.com - A competitor to the eHarmony dating site. I'm not really sure what the attraction for dating sites is to my blog.
philadelphiasingles.org - This dating site is interesting because it's directed at people in my area. More about that after the list...
rojo.com - They are a web aggregator that upset me one day when I realized that it's basically the Entertainment Tonight of aggregators, skimming the surface of web news and going no deeper.
savethechildren.org - I was getting tired of public service ads showing up on pages that Google didn't know what to do with.
subscriptionsforsoldiers.com - At some point at the beginning of the Iraq conflict, these ads started showing up on very inappropriate posts.
thebiotechdictionary.com - My guess is that these guys mistakenly thought that buying ads on sites that had domains with terms that were the same as in their dictionary would increase their pagerank for those terms. Even though that's not true, I didn't want to help them redefine where Google points "Asymptomatic".
thegayquiz.com - Hey, your lifestyle is your lifestyle and I respect that, but my mom (and other family) reads my blog, thanks. If dating sites aren't cool, this fluff site certainly isn't either.
typepad.com - Really, I have no idea why I blocked this domain.

Something I re-learned recently is that it's pretty darn easy to correlate an IP address to a metropolitan region in the US. That's how they manage to target ads to geographic places. Google actually seems to have narrowed the metro areas into the regions that most tools use to define what the region is. Or, worded in a less convoluted way, Google seems to have defined what metro regions are on the web. That's kind of weird.

Read the rest →