One of my newest acquisitions is The-Bomb.com. It’s another aged domain - from June 1998. I wanted to have an email address of george@the-bomb.com and maybe put up a few pictures of our family outings. It’s a lot like a personalized license plate on a car.
The-Bomb.com
About a year ago I picked up MadHacker.com at auction. The domain name was auctioned at a relatively early hour on a Sunday, so bidding was not as fierce as I expected and I got the name for a song. Like a lot of people in my generation, I grew up with computers. My first computer was an Apple IIe - ‘e’ for enhanced! I always wanted to be a hacker, but I spent too much time in sports and school to learn the ‘trade’. So, when I saw this name, I got kind of nostalgic and thought it would be cool to have in my domain name collection.
Domain Tools lists a domain creation date of 9 May 1995 - which is really old compared to a majority of the domain names today. For example, Amazon.com is only 6 months older! From researching the name, it doesn’t appear to have ever really been developed. That makes sense, because the negative connotation the name has doesn’t really lend itself to any legitimate business. At any rate, it’s still a cool name to me.
Right now, I have the domain pointed to a student run pop art site called SuperFlyGallery.com as I don’t have any really plans to develop this name anytime soon. I just like the name!
Part of the fun of domaineering is the collecting aspect. Collecting domain names is sort of like a modern day version of coin and stamp collecting - including the present value and potential future value said domain names might garner. There are times, though, where part of the collection doesn’t necessarily fall into the ‘value’ category.
For example, a couple of days ago, I picked up HolyBrotherhood.com at auction…for cheap. I did a quick Google search on the name and found several references to the book, Don Quixote. It seems as though the Holy Brotherhood interacted with Sancho Panza and Don Quixote throughout the book. That’s cool! And, while a professional domaineer would most certainly scoff at this name, it’s part of my hobby and in my personal collection. That’s the fun part of domain name collecting.
My family business since 1991 is a bricks and mortar trophy and awards store. This year we decided to take a leap into the 21st century and create an online presence via an ecommerce store. At the very least, we figured the store could serve as a catalog online for our current customers.
Finding the right domain name seemed easy at first. I registered SidelineAwards.com and then thought ZoomAwards.com sounder better. Then, I went on a trophy domain name registering frenzy. I picked up an old domain name, AcmeTrophy. I registered BaseAwards.com, BaseEngraver.com (we do a lot of engraving for the military), TrophyVault.com, GreatPlaques.com, and a few more I can’t remember at the moment. We had all but settled on BaseAwards.com when I stumbled across TrophyStar.com doing a search on DomainTools (a great domain name resource). I liked the sound and ‘feel’ of the name.
We then asked random customers which name they preferred, and it was an almost unanimous choice of TrophyStar.com. So, for $7.15 I was able to get a decent domain name for my online store. Now, the hard part - building the store and then getting it out on the web!
