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.