I once owned radiohead.org. I sold it for $200 in 1999, thinking I had made a killing, seeing as how I had bought it just months before for $35. But alas, I was a fool.
I could have done some minimal search engine optimization to get the site ranking for the term “radiohead” which would have been a piece of cake, put up some links to to albums at amazon.com, put up some Google Adsense ads, and have been making a few hundred per month. Of course in 1999 Adsense didn’t exist and I’m not sure Amazon’s affiliate program did either, but geez, what was I thinking?!!! Argh. I’ll never live that one down.
You could say that someone giving me mwi.com for free makes up for it, but it doesn’t. That was a great thing, to be sure, but they’re in entirely different categories and a success in one doesn’t make up for failure in the other. My epitaph will read “This man sold radiohead.org for $200.” I should just go buy it right now and put it on my desk.
If only I could go back in time to 1993 or thereabouts. I wouldn’t know what stocks to pick. I wouldn’t know what to bet on. I couldn’t afford to buy real estate. But man, I would sure know which domain names to buy, and I’d be buying up a load of them. Speaking of time travel, if someone can travel backwards in time how come they’ve never visited us? Seems to me that disproves the whole idea right there. Of course traveling forward in time is a piece of cake, I do it every day, but who would want to accelerate it if you couldn’t go back? Anyway…
Getting mwi.com for free was certainly the best luck I ever had securing a domain name. But you’ll probably laugh at my second best domain name–laundromatic.com.
It really flows off the tongue, doesn’t it? It speaks to everything we’ve come to recognize as good and wholesome about laundromats. The pure white machines with stainless steel trim, the soap bubbles, the peaceful atmosphere unsullied by any untoward noise or distraction. Well, I should probably start an entirely separate post about this one, I can tell it’s going to be a long story. And after selling radiohead.org, stories are about all I have to live for…
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