plasticbag.org

First things first, let’s link to Matt Jones who showed this to me. The reasons for the link will become clear shortly. There’s an interesting trick you can play with referrers which Matt showed me (here). Through use of a few pieces of javascript, you can list the places that people who come to your site have come from. Here’s an example:

Here are five boring reasons why the Google effect will not dramatically affect the need for domain names (as is argued in this article). The article argues as follows:

“The most interesting from a domain-name point of view is this: With the rise of search tools that unerringly bring you to the page you want, the need for a highly specific domain name — one that a casual Web user would be able to guess — has practically disappeared.”

I should start off by saying that this statement is of course true. But it’s not the same as saying that the use of search engines like Google will radically decrease demand for domain names. Because what he’s concentrating on is an individual’s attempts to find for the first time a specific type of website or online service by guessing the name. There are many other types of searches, and many other reasons for a domain names existence. Here are a few of the boring reasons I’ve come up with:

Boring reason 1: Repeat traffic. If I am an e-commerce based retailer then it does me no good if people only come to my site for a very specific purpose (one product) and then depart never to return, unless of course that’s the only product I sell. Because relationships between shoppers and shopping sites are developed over time – the shopper has to trust the company to sell to them. And that means that they have to visit a number of times – each time with a slightly different agenda. Other sites also rely on repeat traffic – even personal site like weblogs operate on the principle that an individual will become involved in reading the content, and return regularly. This actually goes right down to the point where it can be recognised that to a large number of people – finding a site like a weblog through a search engine probably isn’t going to be useful to either party. The weblog is unlikely to answer their query like a pure information site would – and is designed for a completely different approach to reading. Memorable site names aid repeat traffic.

Boring Reason 2: Authority. Do you believe what you read on the internet? All of it? Without question? If so then you are incredibly foolish – because for every light-hearted spoof there is a hate-mongers site or a rampant charlatan. If I search for a page about cancer treatments, I want to go to a site that has a name that I trust – my first point of call wouldn’t be to a page on GeoCities. The (right) domain name is like a badge, which affiliates you with the institution that you purport to be from much successfully than merely saying that you’re from the FBI or MacDonalds. All sites which have a function that requires a relationship of trust between the parties or which needs to come from a trusted source is more likely to achieve that function with a domain name than without one. A domain name suggests you are who you say you are.

Boring Reason 3: Advertising and branding. Because repeat visitors and a relationship of trust are so important to most serious sites, advertising and branding has become tremendously important – from the top (Amazon) to the bottom plasticbag.org). Domain names make this process significantly easier.

Boring Reason 4: How people actually search. The previous three sections have described reasons that domain names remain important. This section goes the other direction, and suggests that while they are important, they have never really been important in the way that Gilmore describes. There are lots of types of searches that people make on the internet. Most of these searches do not fit into the two narrow categories that he elucidates. In fact most of them have never had any relationship to domain names. If you are attempting to ask a question by reference to the internet – you are unlikely to end up at the front page of a site. Once you get past people searching for things like “Hotmail” or “Amazon.com” you are left with searches based on current events, celebrity gossip and searches made to answer all the hundreds of thousands of questions that people want answered. Gilmour makes it sound as if searching had previously been synonymous with the guessing of domain names (albeit much more successful) when in fact guessing a domain has never been a particularly important path to most of the pages on the World Wide Web.

Boring reason 5: And anyway – doesn’t the domain name help the search engine? I’m not going to push this too heavily, as there are now many other factors that a search engine takes into account when it’s figuring out the relevance of it’s search results – but the presence of a domain name certainly doesn’t hurt…

Let’s go back to the beginning and think about it logically. In fact the search approach that Gilmour describes has only really ever worked in very specific circumstances – like when you’re attempting to find a company by using it’s trading name or when you’re searching for generic domain names – like sex.com or bookshop.co.uk. Once you’re outside the remit of those particular limited circumstances, his argument loses much of its plausibility…

Last night at nine o’clock, our flat was struck with a terrible choice. Would it be Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes or Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums? Several nanoseconds later we had settled on the latter – citing only vastly superior quality and entertainment as our reason. Within ten minutes I had turned to my flatmate and said, “Mella, when this gets to the end can we rewind and watch it again?” She assented. But this delightful fate was not to be, as once the film had ended, we found ourselves woefully drawn to the pulsating breasts and buttocks of Baldwin Jnr and Crawford in tits’n’arse cinema car-crash Fair Game…

Freelance work is sent to try us. It’s just designed to drive you mad. Today I’ve discovered that the ¬£350 that Time Out owe me for writing the gay section of this year’s London Guide has been sent to a place I haven’t lived in for two years. Two years! This wouldn’t annoy me so much if it wasn’t for the fact that I worked at Time Out full time for nearly 18 months after I moved from my old flat.

One of the hazards of working for a friend (and from home) is that they see nothing particularly wrong with text messaging you at seven in the morning, when you’re still comfortably asleep and warm having been up until 2am playing with code. This will have to stop.

But Danny isn’t the only one of my friends acting strangely this morning. The fact that many of my contemporaries have their own personal sites makes tracking their lunacies easier than ever. It’s like their affectations, mood swings and quirks are frozen in hypertext amber. Let’s see:

Michael has in the course of a month decided to give up smoking, take up yoga and have various parts of his body shot through with metal. It’s like he’s becoming the anti-Michael – completely different from the man I knew at University. And he’s decided to give up smoking by taking Zyban [Official site]. I’m confused by this turn of events – as a smoker myself I can see the attraction of giving up, I can even understand getting help to do so – patches, gum – these things make sense to me. But there’s something about taking medication to ween yourself off a habit that seems strange to me. Shouldn’t the remedy match the problem in some way? What happened to willpower?

While Michael’s becoming a highly medicated “my-body-is-a-temple” kind of guy, Matt is beginning to respond to the world as if it were one huge and continual head-trip. In his latest post he’s reading a book on the tube when he comes upon the Hebb Hypothesis. The text he’s reading goes like this, “Most viable theories of memory require some form of synaptic modification dependent on the correlation of pre-and postsynaptic neuronal firing (which we will denote as the Hebb Hypothesis).” This triggers a chain of intellectual association-making – a kind of magically synaptic corona – in and around Matt’s mind. And he launches into one of the trippiest pieces of writing he’s produced in months:

“Outside the feeling of claustrophobia hadn’t lifted. I looked up at the blue sky and the buildings and understood what I was seeing what the physical alteration in my machine. Suddenly everything reversed, my brain turned inside-out and instead of clouds and windows I saw the patterns of my brain — an inverted sphere, the whole universe of my perception as solid brain, and a hole inside, a gap in this solid the exact shape of my old brain, vacant, and me, reflected by the universe inside it, a hologram.”

So Michael’s become a pharmaceutical Buddha and Matt’s become Techie Jim Morrison. And this has all happened while I’ve slept. Someone seems to have slipped something into the meme-stream this morning. It’s having an effect on everyone.

I’ll end with David and Meg – two successful, well-paid, essentially sober individuals. Surely these two would be immune from any mass-mind-fuck that’s going down? It seems not. For they too have been exploring whole new states of being, by carefully detailing their respective experiences of their local mall – the O2 Centre. Now I too am a fan of this establishment – in fact Meg’s descriptions of the fake rocks, piped bird noises and plumes of lit water make me feel almost nostalgic. (Aside: the same effect could be acheived with fibre optic cables, keyhole surgery and a large quantity of beer.) But I’m awed by their desire to chronicle these experiences in such detail. It’s as if their senses have been enhanced in some way, and instead of seeing fibre-glass and escalator, they’re seeing patterms of light and colour – Acid-visions of modern life…

Is it just me? Am I the only one left with a mundane brain? Am I the only one who can’t see the music and feels it passing through me?

An amusing moment this afternoon – I got an e-mail from my flatmate recommending that I check out the Buffy Swearing Keyboard, humourously suggesting that it was ‘made for’ our Buffy-obsessed flat. At which point I had to explain that the keyboard in question was made by a guy I used to work with and that the idea of having Buffy speak loud obscenities emerged one morning when we were outside the office having a cigarette.

Quote of the day: “Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.” [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

One of the wonderful things about having a little brother who’s thirteen years younger than you was that just when you’re really supposed to have put childish things behind you, you get the opportunity to do them all over again in the guise of ‘playing with the little one’. Which of course meant that my youthful obsession with Lego models managed to exist in a modifed form well into my twenties. Which makes announcements like the Lego Spiderman all the cooler – even as I approach my thirtieth birthday… [via Haddock]