One of the flaws of being a geek is registering website addresses late at night whilst intoxicated; that’s how thoughtsymposium.com was born. That, and a lost blogging focus at the time. Over two years later it’s time for something new, something me; literally me .online.
The name of this blog may have changed, but that’s it. I’ve just returned to self-branding; welcome to michaelwhite.online. That’s right, no .com or .co.uk, it’s a new breed of domain name. If you access old links that point to thoughtsymposium.com they will automatically redirect to the new name.
A couple of years ago The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organisation in charge of registering domain names, went a little nuts. They came up with a whole bunch of generic top-level domains (equal to .com’s etc.) to reinvigorate the domain name market.
The move was also a solution to a growing problem, the internet is running out of older top-level domains (.com, .org, .net, .gov, etc.) Not helped by domain resellers; people and organisations who register domain names and resell for thousands, even millions.
So why .online? Of all the new domain names that have been registered, .online has been the most popular. A day after its launch in August 2015 over 35,000 registrations were recorded, with companies such as Microsoft and Bank of America catching a piece of the geek action. Of course, resellers also snapped up thousands of domains. As michaelwhite.com remains hostage to a domain reseller, .online was the obvious modern option.
Apart from the name, the site exists as it was. It’s had a little bit of a minor facelift (still not happy with it!) but functionality remains the same. If anything, changing the domain name has given me time to tweak some technical elements in the code, hopefully seeing better gains in Google Search.
Now, onto writing a blogging content calendar for 2016…
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