At $9.95 per domain, failure doesn't cost that much

This might be seen as somewhat embarrassing, but I thought it would be interesting to recap some of the domains I’ve registered over the years:

NJFilm.com

This was my very first domain, registered in 1997. It was supposed to be a community hang-out, idea-sharing site for independent filmmakers in New Jersey. It failed utterly, except for the parts where I got to practicing building Web pages.

ActuallyHappened.com

I think this is before I knew about Fray. I wanted a place for people to contribute true and unbelievable stories. It got zero submissions. Oh, well.

LifeAfterMTV.com

This was a meta-blog that aggregated (manually, of course) the blogs of people who were previously on MTV’s “The Real World” and “Road Rules”. It was extremely snarky, and pretty well received. I think the highlight was getting a link from somewhere in Yahoo!‘s entertainment division. I got bored with the topic after about a year.

AdGrinder.com

AdCritic.com was so great, and I wanted a place to store fan-made parodies of advertisements, which I had a few ideas for. Nobody really had any interest in contributing. I’m still proud of the header graphic.

Webgeek 0lympics

It was supposed to be an annual one-day competition with lots of various events that all related to Web design-y stuff. Besides getting together a great list of celebrity judges, almost nobody participated. I think some of that might be because in order to enter, you were supposed to send a trackback ping to a specific weblog entry. Nobody understood Trackbacks then, just as nobody understands them now. The other reason it didn’t work is probably because it was a dumb idea. But I had to try.

theynow.com

My first – and so far best – experiment with podcasting. Despite the infrequency of updates, I have more than a thousand listeners and the support of the rock band that I’m podcasting about. I’ve gotten to interview people like Jonathan Coulton and Common Rotation, and other high-profile podcasters have contributed to the show. I should really pay more attention to it.

coderwisdom.com

This was a total impulse buy, and did little more than translate inspirational quotes into various programming languages. It’s one of those things that you think is really funny and other people mostly don’t. Oh, well.

LunchCorp.com

Also soon to fade into archive-land, it’s a clearinghouse for ideas I’ve had that I wanted other people to pursue. In retrospect, I probably should have just kept them on re-run.

StopBeingBroken.com

I am having a great time making this (really, really) short show. Looking at it from the outside, I can see why someone might now know what to make of it. It’s not a news show, and it’s not strictly entertainment. Individual episodes get watched (as of this writing) about 300 times each, so I’m considering it a success. And every time I make a new show, I learn (or re-learn) something about lighting, camera placement, editing, etc., which feels really good.

DeepHub.com

Nobody was writing about the new age of entertainment distribution, so we have to. I think it’s fascinating, even if I’m not doing a lot of it myself.

There are a few sites that never got off the ground, like The Frightened Chef (don’t have a studio), Robot News Now (don’t want to do the news), The Songwriters Studio (don’t ask), and The Show Music Show (don’t want to pay licensing fees).

I’ve tried a lot of things over the past ten years. Most of it went badly, but each failure was worth every penny. I think the only regret I have is that I didn’t find someone to take over LifeAfterMTV.com. I must’ve tried, though. That sounds like something I would do.

Comments

12 May 2008, 13:31