Dutch vacuum salesman pumps Google for €1m A Dutch vacuum cleaner salesman is demanding a massive payday from Google in exchange for control of his company's web address, Knol.com. The advertising giant is aiming to end its heavy reliance on Wikipedia for useful search results by brewing its own web encyclopedia, Knol (it's short for knowledge, apparently). The new …
It's pretty obvious that Google would need to pay many times more once their plans became public. They would have received a much better price if they told the guy some time ago that Knol was one of a number of options they were considering, and how about accepting 30,000 Euros to swap to Knol.net instead...
I mean, if this guy had knol.biz, fair enough, but the big one - the .com - did Google not have a look, see it was already registered, and either make him an offer before launching the site, or just consider changing the name?
Paris, because she checks the name before getting involved. Probably.
Good on him....even if he wasn't using it for company business he has the right to own the domain based on the fact that it matches his surname. I wish him all the best in screwing as much as possible out of Google, as there's bugger-all else they can do about it, other than change their plans.
He should do what Sky computing (Canadian if memory serves) did to the Murdoch TV Empire of the same name. They not only got a bonanza payout for sky.com but, for quite some time afterwards, the other Sky had to display a link at the top of the home page, splendid in it's isolation, saying "if you're looking for sky computing, click here" or somesuch.
That'd seriously piss off Google with their addiction to minimalist home pages and, as there's a good precedent here, he'd probably be backed in this request by the registrars.
Of course, he'd want to do this to allow time for his customer base to absorb the change and get his stationery and such sorted and not to piss off Google at all. Honestly.
Can't think of anything worse (well, that's not strictly true!). I mean, it's bad enough trying to find the right answer in a help forum. Wikipedia is ok as it only gives a few results, each of them on different (if related) topics. Knol sounds like you'd end up with a an amount of pages giving the word Knoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool along the bottom of the screen, each a slight variation of the others and none of them getting anywhere close to correct.
A friend of mine said that his (largish) company employed people specifically, to pretend to be from some smallish company wanting to buy domain names from existing parties that the largish company wanted to have.
The idea being that a small company would only spend a small amount of money for this, but if it was known that a large company wanted it, the price would go up of course.
Cmon Google. Should have said you were Gogl instead of Goooooooogle.
Slipped up myself though - went to register Flicker.com but those bstards just knocked a vowel out of it, and now look at them.
no.
a good few years ago a major investment bank held a big meeting saying its online banking system would be called something or other (i could tell you but i'd break my cover. you ain't seen me right).
a contractor walks back to his desk, checks the domain name. ooo its not registed. registers it on the spot and the bank having spent a little bit on branding already and not wanting a fuss or to look like complete pillocks had to pay to get the domain off him.
allegedly.
and no it wasn't me.
From what I remember, the Netherlands may not have capital gains tax, but it does have something called "vermogensbelasting" [capital tax]. So yes, you don't get taxed on the gains from your capital, but on ALL of it (I remember a number like 0.8% but that is from a few decades ago).
> Knowl. At least the spelling would be close to correct.
That would be NOWL.
Just pronouce it slowly, loudly and distinctly.
Google uses short words (mail, maps, news, mail) wherever possible (take notice: NOT email, but mail); consequently they'd rather use nowl instead of knowl. IANAG, and neither are you, so this discussion is academic in every respect.
> images.google.com
I wonder why they didn't name this subdomain "pics" - that's the word for photographs and sundry imagery on the intertubes.
Anyway, using subdomains under their company name is both simple and clever. It lets them overcome every case of tricky domain squatting. Even better when they own "google" under all TLDs (which they now do).
> advertizing
A fine-grained tuning of Opera renders all websites ad-free. This is spam-free to those who are alergic to ads. Do not use Opera? Get an html-caching proxy, other browser + some extension(s), or a decent hosts file for your system, or, or, or. There are dozens of technical means to kill all that distracts you from reading.
I do find Knol pretty interesting, especially if it is used like a library full of books, short stories and analytical literature. This is no Wikipedia; make no assumptions about it. Instead of elaborate search for an item of information I'd rather focus on a topic, and dive in.
Thumbs up to Google.
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