New .london domains touted tomorrow amid usual tech hypegasm Do you have any idea what "wind and kite" means? No? Well, it's Cockney rhyming for “website.” But from tomorrow, rather than lobbing geezer slang around, you'll have a much easier time making sure the world knows your business is from London. Tuesday marks the launch of the .london, and addresses using the new generic top- …
Going by the comments in the article, the people taking up .london are the ones with enough money not to care what it costs, and a strong desire to stop anyone else grabbing in and squatting on "their" name. That is, no-one actually wants .london, they just want to make sure no-one else gets it. Registrars are making money out of TLD prophylaxis, the internet gets stranger every day.
It feels really strange that the Internet has shrunk the world for so many people, making us feel more like a global society and then people want domain names tied down to cities.
Look at the popularity of .com compared to country specific TLDs. It seems odd to me that anyone's that fussed about .london, beyond tourism and companies scared of the domain being squatted.
Believe it or not, London's not the worst place on the planet to live. It's not even the most overpriced, pretentious, overpopulated or smelly.
Any of those descriptors would apply pretty much as well to Seoul, Miami, New York, Moscow, Paris, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, or 'most any other city big enough to be noticeable on a world map.
Any advice for would be squatters? Tonight I'm going to write a list of .london domains I want to squat. How do I submit them all 1 second after they go on sale? ideally less than a second. 100ms is probably too much. There must be an interesting technical solution to this important problem.
Easy - Lily Allen's registered prior art:
Riding through the city on my bike all day
Cause the Tube's all out on strike again
It really gets me down and this ain't OK
Cause I won't get home tonight before ten
Boris says London's leading the world
Because it's getting its own domain name
There's a major risk to branding as the TLD's expanding
Because squatting's just a legal blame game
You might laugh, you might frown
Surfing round London town
Pie is in the sky
Oh why, oh why would I wanna be anywhere else?
Pie is in the sky
Oh why, oh why would I wanna be anywhere else?
When you look with your eyes
Hipsters all sound bright
But if you look twice
You can see it's all shite
Fortnum and Mason have a big shop in town
You can meet them down in Piccadilly
They're buying a domain 'cos they think they need the fame
Even though the long name is silly
Then a shyster comes along to offer a hand
And as soon as they've signed the contract
Shag 'em up the rear end, leave them with an ABEND
And vanish without leaving a contact
You might laugh, you might frown
Surfing round London town
Pie is in the sky
Oh why, oh why would I wanna be anywhere else?
Pie is in the sky
Oh why, oh why would I wanna be anywhere else?
When you look with your eyes
Hipsters all sound bright
But if you look twice
You can see it's all shite
Life
Yeah, that's city life
Yeah, that's city life
Yeah, that's city life
Actually, it took me about fifteen minutes to jot that down. However, I must hang my head in shame - I didn't realise there were so many closet Lily Allen fans on here, and I'm terribly sorry for upsetting them.
I shall now go away and write out a thousand times, "I must not disrespect Lily Allen on El Reg."
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