Guest Blog

Fellow blog-readers: Emperor Penguin here.....

After over a year of silence, I finally found something to rage about. I am angry; I am vexed; I am seething with rage (those of you who know me, know I am usually a pussycat).

Janet and I are trying to slowly change over our personal email addresses to reflect the changes in internet technology and ease of use -- plus AOL's software is buggy and inefficient. So, rather than get an email name from our ISP that will go away the moment we change providers (you know we will), we decide to register our names on the internet so we can have permenant addresses where anyone can find us. So we try to register harriett dot com and discover it has been registered. Now, normally this would not bother me, someone bought it fair and square and we came too late. So I check out the link on the web. Who owns the site? "Buy Domain Names.com." They said that I can buy the domain name for anywhere from $1,000 - $10,000! My own name! How terrible is that? I feel violated, like my identity has been stolen. These are considered "investments" by some people: they buy as many names as they can think of and then try to re-sell them to the legitimate owners of the name hoping to make a profit off these people. I hope eventually someone with more brains and resources than I will introduce laws making this sort of "cyber-squatting" illegal.

So, unfortunately, for the time being, I cannot have use of my own last name with a dot com extension for people to find me easily. Dot net and dot org were also registered, but they were taken by legitimate people actively using the name -- I don't mind that one bit. Once I set up our family email accounts, people will be able to find us at the best domain name left available to us: dot us!

And if anyone reading this has designs on taking our personal names, I also took the time to register:
elieharriett.com
elieaharriett.com
janetharriett.com
janetlharriett.com

The dot net, dot org, and all other dot extensions are available to anyone who wants them. However, most people's searches usually begin and end with a dot com entry.

And for all who listen, I implore you, register your names as soon as possible if they are still available. You never know if you will want it later. Trust me, it is downright humiliating seeing a stranger offering your own name out for $1,000+. My recommendation is www.godaddy.com. They charge $8.95/year for a dot com address; most others are less. Even if you are like us and do not plan on putting up a website, it is a way of protecting your good names.

Good luck, all. I promise my next guest blog will reflect a kinder, nicer emperor penguin. I'm not really a raving lunatic (no, really, I'm not). This just really infuriated me. We now return you to your regular roving penguin reporter......