Master of Your Domain

Despite all the lame attempts to hype .co and other top-level domains, the king is still .com  It can't be touched for recognizability and respect.  If you're serious about your on-line presence, you have to own a .com domain, even if you're not commercial.

However, since there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million .com domains, it's getting very hard to find a name that isn't already taken.  So businesses are looking for evocative but meaningless names to register.  These are names that sound like actual words, but aren't.

The usual practice is to combine two or more words, as follows:

• Verizon = verity or veracity(?) + horizon (or possibly verify + horizon)
• Wikipedia = wiki (Hawaiian for quick) + encyclopedia
• Microsoft (not qualities most males would want to be associated with, but derived from microcomputer + software)

Another approach is corrupt spelling:

• Netflix (and its spin-off, Qwikster)
• Sporcle (from oracle)
• Google (from googol, itself a made-up word.) 

It's fun to try to come up with these.  Using the combined words approach gave me things like:

• Digifaction
• Docurity
• Infortress

However, all of these were taken.  Perhaps I should then run the spelling corrupter to get names like:

• Dijifakshun
• Dokuritee
• In4tris

I'm not even bothering to check these.  You can have them.