On Mon, May 21, 2007 3:26 pm, Chris L. Morrow wrote:
There's an interesting read from NRIC about this problem: "Signposts on the information superhighway" I think it's called. Essentially no one aside from propeller-head folks understand that there is something aside from 'com' :( take, for example, discussions inside the company formerly known as uunet about email addresses: "Yes, you can email me at chris@uu.net", "uunet.com?", "no, uu.net", "uu.net.com?", "nope, just uu.net". Admittedly it was with sales/marketting folks, but still :(
To a great degree, there effectively stopped being anything outside .com when there stopped being any distinction between who was eligable for .com, .net or .org, and it just became a "credit card, please" free-for-all. I can't imagine anyone now registering a new .com and *not* registering the corresponding .org and .net, making them pretty much pointless for new registrations. It's only legacy domains, and occasional gap-finding in legacy registrations, where the registrant isn't the same for all three.
I wonder how the .de or .uk folks see things? Is the same true elsewhere?
.co.uk generally seems to be understood by UK folks. .org.uk tends to cause a double-take. (The 'special' UK SLDs, like nhs.uk, are a maze of twisty turny third-levels, all on different logic). My email confuses people by being both a .org and too short - the general public seems to expect either firstname.lastname@company.com or some-long-random-attempt-to-sound-cool-with-numbers-because-100-other-people-had-the-same-idea@{yahoo,gmail}.com.