The Law so cited states that when you do something, particularly something significant, there will be outcomes and side effects and results that nobody, not even you, guessed, let alone intended.
One writer speculates that the slow-down in domain registrations comes from the success of Google.
The most interesting from a domain-name point of view is this: With the rise of search tools that unerringly bring you to the page you want, the need for a highly specific domain name — one that a casual Web user would be able to guess — has practically disappeared.
While he gives some good examples, I can confirm this through my own experience.
I was trying to find the site for Guardians of Order (the publishers of Big Eyes, Small Mouth, which is another story).
But where to look? www.guardiansoforder.com? Or .net? Maybe it’s hyphenated, www.guardians-of-order.com. Or maybe they used their acronym, for www.goo.com.
In the end, I simply looked them up in Google — and found it was www.guardiansorder.com (or, more formally, www.guardiansorder.on.ca).
Locking up a basic domain name is useful — it provides corporate identity better than www.sitehost.com/xY12rt5 would. And it’s probably useful to some degree to lock up some of the major possible alternatives so that people don’t get too confused if they do find the other location (there’s at least one site I visited frequently a year or two back that was supposed to be .net, since the .com version was a completely different company).
But by and large, it’s no longer seen as necessary to lock up every single variation of the name, just in case people start trying to type in addresses, any more than every auto shop needs to name themselves something like “Main Street Auto Repair” so that people will know how to get there.
Interesting stuff.
(Via Boing Boing)