Monday, 06/24/02

Two days ago I received a novel piece of demi-spam, addressed to "info" at my domain. "Jamie Boldon" wanted to know if I was interested in acquiring bumppo.com.

When I registered bumppo.net, none of the other suffixes were taken, but within a year or so they'd been snapped up by domain name resellers, presumably to sell back to me (I got some offers). The message from Mr. Boldon said he had bumppo.com, was selling it through "cenion.com", and wanted $89.95. There was a cenion.com URL I could click on to seal the deal.

As it happens, I'd like to use bumppo.net for something commercial and higher-profile in a couple of months, and when that happens, it could be cool to appropriately redirect those people who just enter "bumppo" into their browser.

I fired up a whois search to see if Mr. Boldon was the owner of record for bumppo.com, and to my surprise, whois indicated that the name was unregistered. Whois sometimes lags behind reality, so I checked with my domain registrar, which has more timely data. Sure enough, it was available, and I snapped it up.

I had a strong suspicion that, were I to have clicked on that cenion.com link, a robot would have reached out and snapped up bumppo.com, then resold it to me for a 600% markup. That's sneaky, but darn clever.

Having reviewed Cenion since I got the domain, it turns out that they're not that smart. A human (possibly the "seller") reviews my Cenion request for bumppo.com and gets back to me after sewing it up himself.

Postscript: While I was verifying that my registration of .com had gone through, Network Solutions helpfully suggested a long list of "similar" domains, mostly bumppo with oddball top-levels, but a few that were just delightful on their own terms: "bumpspo.com", "bumpedpo.com" and "bumpingpo.com". Say them out loud, you'll probably start to giggle too. 06:23PM «

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