i suppose to the BBC, the fact that there are lots and lots of domains registered now might be news, but i'm not willing to jump to the same conclusions they are. i have no doubt that there are a good number of personal domains out there and that the number of folks plunking down $8 a month for their own web site. 1 GB of online web mail storage? Yawn. i've got that (and more) and just as fast search using Thunderbird's MAPI interface.
Of course, i'm willing to bet that the VAST majority of folks scarfing up various domains are, in-fact, SEO type businesses who are trying to game various search engines by grabbing every combination of "care","feeding", and "wombat" or whatever keywords they want. Just do a search for something like Boston Hotels and see what comes up. How many of those domains do you want to guess didn't exist last year and aren't stand alone sites?
Of course part of me is bugged by this. As much as i play SEO games just like everyone else, i do follow a number of self imposed rules, one of which is no sitespamming.
Granted, it's a bitch to figure out if someone is sitespamming since they could simply shuffle things around for a particular virtual host and then use CSS to reformat things back to the same virtual page. i'm betting once you get 20 of the exact same pages for a given query, though, you're going to raise a few eyebrows in Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Redmond.
Ah well, anything that can be used, can be abused.
i wonder if i can still get www.c4funfactory.com?
(Shaping charges has never been this much fun!)
