In a three page Article the Washington Post on the day it was purchased, chats about domain names and the new gTLD’s asking whether .com’s go by the way of horse and buggy, well actually “the party line” (which many of the readers never heard of)
“It’s funny, thinking about dot-com,” says Ben Zimmer. Zimmer is a linguist — he’s the executive producer of vocabulary.com — and he thinks a lot about the context and meaning of words. “Even though it still gets used, it’s most often used to refer to the original dot-coms of the late ’90s — the boom and bust. Perhaps for some time, it has had an almost nostalgic quality. It reminds you of that time.”
Now, “dot-com” is almost extraneous: ”
“Every business is a dot-com because every business has an Internet presence. There is a word for when this happens, for when technology moves forward more quickly than the words used to describe it, e.g., “dialing” a phone or “tuning” a radio. Linguists jokingly call them “anachronyms.”
“Dot-com, both the address and the phrase, taught us how to use the Web — how to think about the Internet as both a location and a categorized virtual space.”
“It was the training wheels for the bicycle we now comfortably ride. ”
Does this new expansion represent the end of the training wheels?
The end of the party line and the invention of . . . call waiting?
The time during which the Internet became something beautiful and matrixed, or the time during which it frazzled our brains with confusion?”
The article highlights a Pentagon contractor whom upon hearing about the new gTLD program took her lifelong savings and applied for .Wed
According to the applicant of .Wed “Lots of engaged couples want their own wedding sites, but the addresses they want aren’t available because other couples are already parked on them. Through the .wed domain, couples could purchase an inexpensive address — MarkandJessica.wed — for two years, long enough to see them married. After that, the site’s cost would drastically increase, pricing the couple out, leaving the space open for a new Jessica and Mark.”
While the pentagon contractor was the only applicant for .Wed there are three applications for .Wedding, which the story fails to mention.
Its an interesting read and you can read the entire article here
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