A good name is very important if you are starting a new project. It helps if you have something cool to refer to and it gets things moving. So one of the first things I do if I start thinking about a new project is the name. And a good name is no good unless you also have a good domainname attached to it.
Often people complain that all the good names are gone online. This is not true. All good names are still available! You just have to know how to find them…
Here is how we come up with names for our projects:
1: Collect a lot of related words
Take a few minutes and just brainstorm and try to come up with a huge list (about 100) of related words. If you get stuck just go to Answers.com and look up some of the words you came up with and read the descriptions. This will immediately lead to more new words.
2: Get a dictionary and a needle
Take a dictionary, close your eyes and use the needle to go to a page and select a random word. Do this 10 times. Don’t forget to write down the words and read their descriptions. This leads to more words too.
3: Don’t use a browser to check for domainnames
Don’t check for availability by typing a name into your browser. Use InstantDomainSearch.com and Nameboy.com to easily check names for availability and more brainstorming. Nameboy will give you lots of suggestions and alternatives. InstantDomainSearch uses an AJAX interface to check for domainnames instantly.
Bustaname.com is a new service and great tool for finding names. You can enter several keywords and it will check for combinations of those words with ‘le’, ’ster’ and other options.
4: Invent your own words
Combine words in original ways. Doing something with email and photography? Try ‘Emailography.com‘ (Still available!)
5: Get inspiration from others
Google and Feedster are good names. So if you want to do something with the name ‘John’ (see tip 6) try ‘Johnster.com’ or ‘johnle.com’. Just add ‘Le’ and ‘Ster’ to each keyword you came up with and see what that leads to. Popular these days is to add ‘get’ before your product name (GetClicky.com and GetSatisfaction.com).
6: Buy a second-hand name
All good names are gone? Well yeah, but they aren’t always in use. A lot of great names can be bought secondhand at Sedo or similar domainname collectors. We bought Fleck.com second-hand for a few thousands dollars and always thought it was a great investment. In fact, searching for names at Sedo is a great of coming up with new names. Just enter one buzzword (like ‘RSS’) and Sedo will give you a list of domainnames which contain those characters.
There are more benefits to buying a name this way: If you have an older domain Google will trust you more than if you registered your domain one week ago. Fleck.com got visitors right from the day we went live. A lot of those came from google and other search engines. We now are the first result that pops up if you search for Fleck.
7: Browse a supermarket, library or fishing supplies store
or any place with lots of strange words to get inspiration from. Just browse the aisles and write down all words that are cool, strange or interesting for your business.
8: Translate to Spanish, Greek and Latin
Get some of the related words and translate them into spanish, italian, danish, latin and greek. Answers.com will do it for any word you look up. Just scroll down on every page.
9: Rmove some or all vwls
Take your related words and remove all vowels (A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y) and see what you get. If that leaves you with a too short word only remove a few vowels and try again. Examples: ‘Exmpls’, ‘Etctra’ and ‘Cmputr’
10: Call your mother
Seriously! When you are thinking about your business you often are blinded by technology and company slang. Explain your business to an outsider and ask them what a good name would be. Try you mother and your crocery clerk and the homeless guy asking you for spare change.
My mother came up with several names for several business including the name for my personal holding Bomega and bomega.com. I asked here if she knew a good name and without thinking twice she said “‘Bo’ for Boris and ‘Mega’ for the amount of money you will make becomes ‘BoMega’”.
In 6 days you will be able to register .TEL domain names. But only if you have a registered domain name. If you don’t and just want to have a personal .TEL domain name you will have to wait until February 3, 2009.
The .TEL is different though. It won’t be used as ‘just’ a top level domain. The company behind this new extension, Telnic, has different plans and I’m not sure I totally get it.
What it comes down to is that you can buy a domain name but you won’t be able to use it for anything else expect to redirect it to their server where you will be able to host something that looks like a vCard. If people visit your domain in a browser or on a (supported) phone they will see your contact data.
Yep, that’s it. You won’t be able to use these domains for your blog, or host anything else on them.
Do you get it? I don’t. Maybe watching this video will help.
[poll id="13"]
UPDATE: The kind people at TelNic are taking the time to educate it in the comments and via email. I have received a test account here: thenextweb.vip.tel. Right now it isn’t working yet (”The server at telpages.pilot.tel is taking too long to respond.”) but that might be because the record is still new. The good news: I start ‘getting it’ now. As far as I understand now .TEL is basically LinkedIn or Plaxo for companies but with their own TLD. Sort of like if LinkedIn would start offering “boris.personal.info” as domain names. As Justin Hayward from .TEL mentions ”It’s difficult to introduce new uses of technology that have been around for a while and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your concerns”. So maybe I will ‘get it’ once they launch and I see it being used.
Hans Allis, who runs Second Reality, the excellent hosting company which host TheNextWeb.com, simply set-up a new Domain name (the .COM version) as an Alias to our old domain name. After that we changed the Wordpress settings to reflect the new domain name. Wordpress does all the 301-redirects automatically so you don’t have to worry about that.
If you are moving to a new server you would need to set-up a .htaccess-file and a 301-redirect.php-file with the following content:
After that all we had to do is sit back and relax and wait for the world to catch up. Google took about 6 days to update their index which was very long as it generally takes them less than 15 minutes to find our newly published posts. Our PageRank updated perfectly to 6/10 after a few days too. The only thing that seems to be missing is the little links between our main domain if the search results. Hope these will reappear within a few days.
Feedburner also didn’t give us any problems. We simply logged in and changed our Feed url in the settings and we were done.
The only service that really gives us problems is Technorati. Unfortunately Technorati doesn’t allow you to change your domain name and refuses to update their database. That means that we dropped from a rank of 1,800 (The top 2000 sites of the world!) on TheNextWeb.ORG to a rank of 187,157 on TheNextWeb.COM. That just sucks and I can’t imagine we are the first blog to change its URL. Weird stuff.
Anyway, apart from Technorati, the whole thing went rather smooth and uneventful. Exactly what you would hope for with something as important as a change of domain names.
The .org version of our domain will always work too but now redirects to the .com url. No need to update any old links! We will also start using the .com version for our email addresses but the old ones will also keep working.
So far it looks like everything still works but we are keeping an eye on it and if you see something that doesn’t seem to work as expected please do let us know. As far as I know there shouldn’t be any effect when it comes to Search Engine Optimization but I can imagine that readers are more inclined to return to a blog that has a .com domain name. Right now almost 30% of all our traffic comes from Google so we are keeping on eye on that too!
The extremely popular Makeuseof.com domainname has been stolen over the weekend. The domain name currently redirects to a standard landing page and the original site is now temporarily hosted on Blogspot: http://makeuseof-temporary.blogspot.com/
The owners of Makeuseof.com have some idea of who might have hacked their account and are busy resolving the whole situation:
“The hacker had transferred ownership of the makeuseof.com domain from the GoDaddy account to another web registrar company called NameCheap (the reseller for ENOM). Looking at the emails now we can say that it took him less then an hour to do that. The WHOIS entry is here and you can see that it is an Ali Ferank in Dubai. That’s our bad guy. We have absolutely no idea how he managed to gain access to the account but access it he did. We suspect he might have hacked into the email account tied to GoDaddy but we are still not sure about it.”
They are now in contact with the domain thief who told them bluntly:
Hi there,
I said it very simply and very easily !
2 K !
Deal or not ?!
You own the domain I get the money…
Regards
Apparently Ali Ferank in Dubai found out some of the secret information hidden in their GoDaddy account, then called GoDaddy, impersonated one of the founders and asked GoDaddy to transfer the domainname. After checking the account data with the impersonator GoDaddy complied and moved the domainname to a new host in less than an hour.
The real owners of Makeuseof.com only learned what happened when they couldn’t log into their systems and started making calls to find out what happened. Now they are talking with several hosting companies to get their domain name back, and catch Ali Ferank or the person behind the theft.
Earlier today we were the lucky winners of the Sedo auction for TheNextWeb.com. We noticed it was for sale a few weeks ago and offered $1000 just to see if the owner would be interested in selling. Turned out that $1000 was enough to start a public auction that ended today.
Near the end of the auction we all grouped around one computer and kept reloading the page ready to bid more if the bid would increase. The last 3 minutes were extremely noisy with everybody screaming their lungs out in excitement! Luckily nobody else placed a bid and we were announced the winner by Sedo.
Here is a screenshot of the last minute. It seemed to take forever:
We will be keeping the .ORG domain name and will move to the new domain somewhere in the following month.
Only two weeks to go before companies can register a .me name, the domain from the country of Montenegro. As you can imagine, this is quite an attractive domain. It creates some sort of personalized approach, even when it comes to world’s largest companies. Apple for example has registered apple.me, ipod.me, itunes.me, reports Networkworld. Trademark holders had the opportunity to register their domain names before yesterday. Other tech companies that profited from this rule – are amongst others – Microsoft, Skype and Digg.
What struck me, are the high fees of the .me registrations. Whereas a .com domain only costs you $10 a year, a .me domain will take 110 to 200 Euros per year from your budget. And there’s a catch too: the minimum registration period is five years. I wonder whether our sponsors will run for a domain when the costs are that high. Although Wakoopa.me and Fleck.me do sound good. And what about Netlog? Imagine somebody comes up to you and asks: “Tell me all about yourself?!”. A simple reply will be enough: “just Netlog.me”.
I guess we all know that selling domain names can be pretty good business. But exactly how much money is in that business is anybody’s guess. To give you an impression of what your 4 letter, dictionary safe, erotic style domain name could be worth here is a list of the most expensive domain names ever sold:
1. Sex.com: $12.5 million
2. Porn.com: $9.5 million
3. Diamond.com: $7.5 million
4. Business.com: $7.5 million
5. Casino.com: $5.5 million
6. Asseenontv.com: $5 million
7. Korea.com: $5 million
8. Wine.com: $3.3 million
9. Creditcheck.com: $3 million 10. Vodka.com: $3 million
The interesting thing about this list is the amount of traffic they all generate as measured by Alexa. Sex.com is an obvious winner here but porn.com is only just getting started. And sex.com isn’t even a real site. It just redirects to another domain: sptc.information.com (Yeah, I checked so you don’t have to). If I would own such a great domain name I would use it for something more, well, to the point.
Another surprise is Asseenontv.com. Isn’t that a damn ugly and long domain name? I would guess that it would be a lot cheaper than the 5 million they got for that one.
Do you own any domains you don’t use which might be worth more than usual? Tell us in the comments!
As of today you can register a whole bunch of new, obscene and funny domain names. Montenegro has launched a Registry Service together with Afilias and GoDaddy to sell .ME domains. Soon you will be able to register any domain name ending in .ME at Nic.me.
LinkedIn will soon be rebranded ‘connect.me‘ and Google might go for ‘searchfor.me‘. Or not. But do think about your own brand name and consider registering it before someone else does. Unfortunately the register page was still under construction when we tried to register ‘Visit.me‘
Know a really funny .ME name? Let us know in the comments here.
PS: recognize the title? Think you invented it? You are not alone:
Written on 30th April 2009
2 COMMENTS 
A good name is very important if you are starting a new project. It helps if you have something cool to refer to and it gets things moving. So one of the first things I do if I start thinking about a new project is the name. And a good name is no good unless you also have a good domainname attached to it.
In 6 days you will be able to register .TEL domain names. But only if you have a registered domain name. If you don’t and just want to have a personal .TEL domain name you will have to wait until February 3, 2009.
On November 11 we switched our blogs domain name from 
Written on 21st May 2008
Apple for example has registered apple.me, ipod.me, itunes.me, 
1. Sex.com: $12.5 million
10. Vodka.com: $3 million
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
