As you may have heard, yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the very first dot-com—Symbolics.com was number one, followed by Bbn.com and Think.com. We’re also just a few days removed from the 10th anniversary of the official dot-com bubble burst. Congratulations, dot-com. It’s been a big week for you.
Dot-org is a slightly different beast. Ten years ago, many nonprofits were still saying, “Gosh, we should really have a website.” Today, of course, a good website is just the beginning of what you need as part of your overall online communications strategy. If you bought the domain for your nonprofit anytime in the 1990s or early 2000s, you probably had no trouble getting exactly the URL you wanted in its dot-org form.
Alas, we’re getting to the point that many of the good URLs (along with all the good names perhaps) are taken. If you started a nonprofit, say, in Boston called the Coalition for Ordinary Kids’ Education, you might be surprised to learn that COKE.org redirects to coca-cola.com. Oh, those clever for-profits, gobbling up all the dot-orgs, too.
