Published at 18 August, 2007
in For Sale.
I’ve announced that the After Big Brother domain is for sale over at Active Domaining as follows:
Everyone has a view on the Big Brother reality TV show - love it or hate it. This blog is about what happens next - do the contestants get back to their lives or do they become soap opera stars and pinups?
After Big Brother is a concept blog idea - what I had in mind for it was:
- tracking available public news sources about former Big Brother contestants from around the world,
- using this and a set of tagged posts as the basis for a set of country/gender/background specific categories, so that people could find their favourite (or otherwise) former contestants based on what they knew about them, then
- using available interest to start a forum for the Big Brother fan community.
Monetization was planned to be through straight advertising.
I’m not going to ask a lot for this one - it’s just a domain name and a concept at this stage. That said, if I get enthused and put some work into it so that it starts attracting some real traffic, the price will naturally go up 
If you are interested, contact me.
Published at 13 August, 2007
in For Sale.
I parked GreyWaterConsultants.com with NameDrive while I was deciding what to do with it. It would make a great ad/referral site if set up properly - some ideas I had were:
- a community site (running something like Drupal) where people discuss water re-use options and are offered advice by competing greywater consultants, who they can then rank according to the usefulness of the advice. The consultants would get the chance to strut their stuff (and advertise for free) and their readers would benefit from competitive advice.
- a referral blog where advertorials were added by one or more greywater consultant firms.
- an advertising site where a lot of AdSense/TextLinkAds match on “greywater” could be shown.
I don’t have time to develop it, perhaps you do
Published at 10 August, 2007
in Progress.
The time is fast approaching when I am going to divest myself of some of my blogs - not the ones that have failed commercially (because I am not really making money blogging, yet) but those that I can’t see myself posting to on anything approaching a regular basis. That and I need to make the best use of the ones that remain.
I need to complete the planning, but probable implications are:
- the facibus.com/* blogs (like this one) will be transitioned to their *.com equivalents. I hinted on how this might start in The Blog Collector - BlogDotGov will move from http://facibus.com/blogdotgov to http:/blogdotgov.com and Faux Cuisine will move from http://facibus.com/fauxcuisine to http://fauxcuisine.com. This blog (Facibus On Blogging) will probably transition to http://on-blogging.com
- Some of the marginal blogs (like A Book Thing and Slikkit) will probably just get turned into parked domains - that said, a domain/blog combination with one or two posts on it is probably still worth more as a parked domain than those on parking servers like Named.com or NameDrive.com.
- Facibus Reviews will probably move from http://facibusreviews.com/blog to just plain http://facibusreviews.com
- I’ll probably sell off some of the “metablog” domain names (such as Active Domaining) to see how they go - I don’t really need the money, so I’ll probably donate it to the Smith Family’s Winter Appeal.
- I’ll record the domain-specific results in The Blog Collector - my repository of active domaining experiment notes.
- Finally, I’ll need to figure out what to do with the facibus.com domain - at a bare minimum, I’ll keep it to redirect the facibus.com/* links to http://on-blogging.com and use it for email.
The end goal is to have a set of usable helpful blogs that are worth reading and to get rid of the rest at more than the setup cost.
Anyone have any advice based on the above? I’d be glad to hear any suggestions.
Note: the above was originally published on Facibus On Blogging.
It had to come to this sooner or later - I’m looking at domain parking options. You know those annoying pages full of ads? I’m joining that club. It is a logical extension of the normal activity associated with active domaining I suppose - there is a limit to the number of niche sites and micro-blogs that even I can set up. With anecdotal figures of $20,000,000 for one domaining/parking company in the one year, it could be worth looking into.
Preliminary research indicates that there are a lot of domain parking options:
- GoDaddy.com provides domain parking for $8.99 a month on a 12 month prepaid contract - happily enough, as a Pro Reseller via GetYerOwn.com, I get this for free.
- NameDrive seems to be well thought of here and here.
- WhyPark will let me park 100 domain names with them for $99.95
- Trafficz are after the big guns - 100+ domains.
My choice? I’ve gone with the two free options - I’ll park some domains with GoDaddy/GetYerOwn, and I’ll park some others with NameDrive. It looks like NameDrive will be the better content to advertisement match, time will tell.
greywaterconsultants.com is my first domain deliberately bought to be a directory/ad page. I’m not sure how I feel about these otherwise pointless squatting exercises - my unease means that I should probably find something better to do with the domain. It could be quite a useful resource for people who want to re-use greywater (runoff from the washing machine and shower) - this is becoming a popular thing here in Australia. Stay tuned - I’ll provide an update when I come to a decision.
I comment a lot on Social Computing at Facibus Reviews and HumaneIA. I bought the socialcult.com domain name with the idea that I could comment on the buzz and fuss around Social Computing - to some people it seems to be more of a cult or religion than an enabling technology and a set of supporting processes.
Further to my original post on abookthing.com - I got the blog (It’s A Book Thing) started this afternoon with a post about the handling of intimacy in Harry Potter vs Kim Harrison’s Hallows books, and had my first reader comment within half an hour of posting - cool
I started It’s A Book Thing in response to a serendipitous discovery.
I bought Blog Dot Gov and Faux Cuisine on 01 July 2007 to replace http://facibus.com/blogdotgov and http://facibus.com/fauxcuisine respectively. As subdirectories of facibus.com they were essentially limited to whatever revenue I could get through advertising for them - now they are worth more alive (as ongoing prospects) and dead (as domain names alone).
Today’s purchases: 17 July 2007, I purchsed abookthing.com and on-blogging.com.
A Book Thing (as in, it’s a book thing) could be a “watching the death of books” blog or a book review blog (or both?).
On Blogging will probably be the successor to the popular but unsaleable Facibus On Blogging. What I’ll probably do is restore a WordPress backup to the new site and then mirror posts between them before turning Facibus On Blogging off. The other facibus.com blogs (like Faux Cuisine and BlogDotGov) are being transitioned to their own domains (except for OnWii - this can always be moved as the start of the Nintendo Wii section of tech review blog Slikkit.com).
That then leaves me facibus.com for, well, I don’t know. What can be done with a domain that is Latin for “we make”? I’ll think of something
“Bugerup” or “bagerap” is Tok Pisin for “broken” - it derives from the Australian English slang “buggered up”.
I bought bugerup.com on 05 July 2007 with a view to running a political commentary/satire blog like Crikey (if I ever leave consulting). I haven’t put any pages on it yet - this raises the question of whether it is worth putting a parking/ad page up on domains that don’t yet have a purpose.