.museum domains held in the US | Hacker News Reader

.museum domains held in the US

index.museum

23 pointslarrys22 comments

I noticed http://northcarolina.history.museum/ in the listing. I clicked it, and it resolves to an IP that is no longer routable. http://asheville.art.museum/ suffered a similar fate, and http://ncmls.durham.museum/ immediately redirected to http://lifeandscience.org/.

I imagine a lot of these were purchased as "Hey! There's a .museum top-level domain! Let's buy it! ...You know, we should probably write this down somewhere."

This is similar to .travel top-level domain. Someone thought it was a good idea, just like .museum.

Since 2006, the travel.travel registry has sold 200,000 .travel domains. I am a heavy user of travel sites (Expedia, Hipmunk, hotel sites, etc). I have never, in the course of my online usage, ever run into a .travel site.

This is why gTLDs are likely to fail. At least for users and for purchasers of subdomains, not necessarily for the registrars.

EDIT: added Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.travel

The national tourism bureau where I live recently switched to http://www.fiji.travel/

Strangely enough, they kept the www

The VMFA in Richmond, on the other hand, has a perfectly functional .museum domain, http://vmfa.museum.

I never got why .museum was created, it's way too long and obscure to be effective for domain names. Even shortening it to .mus or something would be a big improvement, but it seems like a lot of museums are using the more commonly known .org or .edu anyways.

More semantic domain names.

Chicago.museum

It was proposed in the Yahoo! Directory era - that is, during a period of time in which it made sense to try to build a hierarchical index of the Internet. By the time .museum was actually approved and implemented, though, crawler-based indexes were already rising to dominance, so the TLD basically missed its chance at relevance.

As others pointed out, this was a different era - more the Yahoo era than Google's, when organizing the Web still seemed (to some) an attainable goal. I worked for the guy behind this at the time, though not on this project, and it seemed very odd to me even then... this is not only a product of its time, but very much a product of the unique and quirky museum technology culture.

Shorter names weren't seen as necessarily good - at least within some of the conversations around this TLD's inception there was some scorn for the overly techie, terse TLDs and domain names.

I wasn't aware the museum technology culture was even a thing. It definitely seems... quirky, though: just look at the list of domains for the JFK museum:

    thesixthfloor.jfk.museum
    dallas.jfk.museum
    dealey.plaza.museum
    dealeyplaza.kennedy.assassination.museum
    dealey.plaza.assassination.museum
    dealey.plaza.jfk.museum

Seems pretty similar to the usenet naming.

http://usenetstats.com/top100reads.php (NSFW). Please also note the non-binary channels.

This is the longest one. national.healthandmedicine.washingtondc.museum It redirects to a real estate site in Spokane.

The 'lang' param at the end of the url is interesting. The English content is 'uk' not 'en' or 'us'. The values seem to be country codes.

Changing the param to a different country only changes the name of the country, nothing else:

country=US&lang=es ==> .museum names held in Estados Unidos:

country=DK&lang=it ==> .museum names held in Danimarca:

Given that it already has a completely unique domain name (si.edu), smithsonian.museum seems overkill.

From a technical POV. But from a human POV, having 'smithsonian.museum' on their signage or advertising could be a win (assuming it's obvious it's a Web address).

Something like this has always worried me with ICANN's idea of opening up TLDs. It feels like a decade ago, most advertisements contained the "www." prefix to signify a web address. Nowadays, you rarely see them, since most people know what to do with a .com, .org, etc.

Once the TLDs open up, will we need to go back to using a "www." to signify this is a domain?

I've been curious about this too. I never know quite how to communicate that something is a web address if my audience is both technical and non-technical folks.

I wonder, though, if a better solution than going back to prepending www would be to prepend // instead. Shorter than http:// (or https:// as the case may be), but doesn't assume that www is a valid subdomain.

> prepend //

Then the technical people think it's a comment, not a web address. Maybe :// would be better? Wait, that looks like some weird emoticon...

I like http:// because it's precise. EDIT: Wow, HN highlights that as a link. It goes to about:blank (on my browser at least).

> Then the technical people think it's a comment, not a web address.

They would be wrong. URLs beginning with // are scheme-relative -- http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-url-20120524/#resolve-a-string-...

Which actually makes it a worse substitute for http:// for a combined technical/non-technical audience that something merely potentially confusable with a comment by a technical audience.

If it's a URI. The issue here is there's no context to determine what it is, so the rules for parsing a URI aren't involved.

> :// would be better? Wait, that looks like some weird emoticon...

I would like to nominate the name "confused duck" for this emoticon.

I think the rising ubiquity of the omnibar will lead to something else entirely: from a non-technical standpoint, the TLD will lose importance. You type the company or phrase into your browser and it'll appear.

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