How We Got Sal (KhanAcademy.org) His Dot Com
domainnoob.com
domainnoob.com
Super job, Demand Media and enom are to be shunned like the plague.
Enom now owns bulkregister so that's another party to avoid, when they bought BR out I moved all my domains elsewhere.
It would be great to see (lots of!) pressure put on enom and demand media to refund the rest of the money as well!
Maybe an email to enom/DM that if within 30 days they have not paid Andrew back that you will take all your business elsewhere ? (and follow through on that).
Press people, please take note of this and write about it!
Did you bother reading the article? Andrew did not put them in touch. John, of DomainNoob, was already a fan of Sal Khan. He somehow ended up watching Sal's interview on Mixergy where it was brought up that .com domain was not available. After watching that interview, John decided to look into the matter and actually went through the whole ordeal to get the domain for khanacademy. Sure, Andrew publicized the issue but all the leg work was done by John.
> Did you bother reading the article?
I did. From the article:
> I was able to contact Sal through Andrew Warner and Sal was happy to have me bid on his behalf.
So if anyone at Demand Media is reading this and wants to do an interview about your company's business practices, email me. I will keep your name/voice/identity completely private.
We can't use the interview to attack Demand Media. I'm just curious about how the company operates.
(These requests on HN have worked before. There's a 50/50% chance this will work.)
But if someone takes you up on your interview offer I'm definitely interested, it should give a unique insight in to the psychology of people like this.
I watched a close friend of mine log into her gmail the other day. To do so, she clicked the Home button in an open browser window and then typed gmail into Google. Obviously, this made my head explode.
But as someone who remembers trying to finagle Yahoo, Astalvista, and Excite into giving me the address for something I knew existed (let alone something I was trying to find for the first time), I'm indescribably happy that just about everyone with internet access can find what they're looking for 99% of the time on the first try.
Like you pointed out, things we used to take for granted as important in many cases aren't anymore. And the internet is a better place because of it.
I've had a similar reaction in the past when people use Google to find sites they frequently visit. However, I've become so disenchanted with the 'net by domain squatters and typo spam/porn sites that I will type a company name into Google now before I try CompanyName.com, just to avoid potential typos or squatters (Dropbox would be the first example I would cite if asked).
What do you mean? Was dropbox.com once owned by a squatter? Just curious.
NameJet is an expired names company that also do pre-release. They are partnered with quite a few registrars to get inventory to auction, not just demand. Pre-release being auctioning off names that expired but didn't go through the regular expiry process but are renewed by the registrar after some period of being on-hold pending the original owner's decision to renew.