In exploring possible sources for domain names, there are plenty of ideas that haven’t worked for me. I thought I would share some so you could choose to avoid them or perhaps take on the challenge.
Digg.com is a community that “promotes” news stories from the web by “digging” them. I thought this might reflect some interesting representation of a tech savvy population and might yield some trends and ideas for domain names. Boy, was I sorely disappointed. “Why Daddy shouldn’t buy baby clothes” and “Darth Vader v.s. Japanese police” greeted me as the most recent popular picks. “Ok”, I thought, “perhaps it’s too small a sample”. So I switched to the most popular stories of the last 365 days. That was not much better with iPhone stories and digging digg. My personal favorite was no.9 “Women gives birth, wakes up without arms or legs”.
My next attempt was to focus on the science section for the last 365 days. While slightly better, the top stories included “5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen” and “8 Sex Positions Women Love”. Still in the end, I did not find any domain names suggesting themselves.
I also played a bit with other social networking/bookmarking sites without much luck. Newsvine.com was not much better either filtering by “most comments” or by “most votes” over a year or all time. Reddit.com, del.icio.us., and ma.gnolia.com were not helpful at all.
In the end, these sites seem to reflect the sensational or most controversial story but they are of short lived interest and so do not make good sources of domain names.
What about books? Surely they reflect what’s on the minds of the people. Those that read anyway. The New York Times best seller list was the place to start. The top 20 paperback non-fiction list just failed to inspire me and the hardcover list wasn’t any better. While the popularity of categories of books e.g. dieting may reflect the public consciousness, a simple best seller list does not seem to and those categories are known to everyone and exploited by all.
I am sure you have your own list of failures and often we don’t share this information but in the end, it is just as important as what works. Who wants to spend fruitless hours in the domaining school of hard knocks.
Happy New Year to all
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I think that when trends get to the stage when they are reported on sites like Digg, or published in books and journals then its usually too late for domainers.
However, there are always opportunities out there so I would not reject these sources completely.
Ray
Agreed that they shouldn’t be rejected completely. Time is precious though and so I spend less time on these kind of sources.
You may be right that it is harder for domainers to find good names once the trends have spread this far. On the other hand, you know there is a clear interest so it is less risky and now the challenge is to be creative in picking your domain names.