This site arose out of the countless times I’ve seen a domain and thought “What the hell is that name supposed to mean. What do they do?”.

You know the type. Jafoodle. Smingler. Wajibbit.  Tells you nothing of the purpose of the site, and doesn’t even have any obvious etymology. The only reason you can fathom is that after the dotcom rush of the late 90s, all the ‘pets.com‘ type domains had gone, nobody likes unmemorablylongdescriptivedomains.com, and so they generate a random string of pronounceable letters and head off to whois. That’s right – basing your whole company name on the fact that The Dot Com Was Available.

Nobody stopped to question why Fshng.com* might not have been snapped up, and so we started telling our friends about sites we couldn’t even pronounce

Now, early on this was considered a clever ploy, and many still popular sites rode high on this wave of gibberish.  Flickr, Digg, hell, even eBay’s pretty meaningless. This sadly only encouraged a rush of poor fools dropping vowels from common words and finding WOW – TDCWA!  Sure. Nobody stopped to question why Fshng.com* might not have been snapped up, and so we started telling our friends about sites we couldn’t even pronounce without sounding like we had a mouth full of cotton wool.

In reading this site you might learn various things. They may include insights into poor management judgement, what LLLL means, and who Yun Ye, Kevin Ham, Rick Schwartz and Frank Schilling are, and why they won’t let you have sensibly named websites.  Then again, you may just get a chuckle at some of the weirder choices people make when branching out in the www.

So here we are. This is a lighthearted (read: don’t sue me) trip through the weird and wonderful world of domains.

*Note: At time of writing fshng.com is still available. Go ahead – snap it up and make your fortune from legions of dyslexic anglers

No related posts.