I registered a domain for a non-profit organization some time ago. They decided to let the site go, and so the domain was left open. It’s a very specific domain, of no interest to anyone other than the original organization.
Received the following email from Ken Palm at securethatdomain.com. Now, there is plenty of sleaze in the domain business: I get “renewal notices” via mail for some of my domains from people looking to charge ridiculous sums, who assume that someone will just pay the bill thinking it is legitimate, for example. But it was hard to read the following email as anything short of the extortion it is. It’s difficult to read “Please understand, I’m not saying that this WILL happen if you don’t buy the domain,” without the stereotyped voice of a mafia enforcer. “You know, sometimes accidents happen. These old shops just go up in flames. Maybe you should buy some insurance…”
In case you are wondering, his “acquisition costs and modest profit” he is hoping to be reimbursed for total $257. The joke of it is, he only needs to hit one of these jackpots from someone who doesn’t want their organization to be associated with a porn site to make up for the thousand that ignore him.
Don’t get me wrong, although I don’t think it’s good, I can understand why a market for trading desirable names has come about, and if you want to buy a “future” in a name like rutabaga.com, that seems reasonable. If, on the other hand, you are looking for easy marks and (hint, hint, nudge, nudge) suggestion that someone might put up a pornographic site that would confuse your visitors, this is another ballgame. Along with things like Site Finder, it represents real bottom-feeding. If this company is enabling typosquatters, particularly for .org or .edu domains, it seems like something the FTC should be interested in. I’m not saying they WILL be interested in it…
Recently, [expurgated].com expired and went into a domain name auction. We acquired it and, since you own the .org version of this domain name, we wanted to provide you with the opportunity to own the preferred .com version. Our company specializes in recovering preferred expiring domains and either selling them to individuals such as yourself or building out our own web presence on those valuable domains.
Why would an Organization or Non-profit want the .com version of a domain?
* .Com is the strongest brand on the internet. When people think of a website, they intuitively think “.com”. Odds are people trying to get to your website are inadvertently going to [expurgated].com because they assume that’s where they can find you.
* Owning the .com can help you protect your organization’s reputation….
It may sound far fetched at first, but only a few years ago the domain name WhiteHouse.com was a site littered with pornography. Imagine users surprise when they wanted to find out about White House tours and end up seeing the offensive material there. (Since then, someone else bought the site and took down the offensive material)
The last thing you’d want to happen is for someone to build a website at [expurgated].com which contains negative or even offensive content.
Please understand, I’m not saying that this WILL happen if you don’t buy the domain. Odd are that it will NOT happen. But, if you’re interested in securing your reputation I strongly encourage you to consider buying the .com today.
If you’d like to own you can buy it now by covering our acquisition costs and a modest profit.
If you have any interest I encourage you to act quickly because this domain name will only be offered for sale for a limited time.
Click Here For Pricing On
https://secure.securethatdomain.com/buy0.phphttps://secure.securethatdomain.com/buy0.php
Please advise,
Ken Palm
ken@securethatdomain.com
tel: 563.823.4644iTime Marketing, Inc
322 N. Main Street
Davenport, IA 52801
Are “strange” courses best?
Via Tomorrow’s Professor I find this list of the top 25 strangest university courses. First, an observation: few of these strike me as all that strange. Perhaps it is because I am in a field–communication–that is often associated with courses about popular culture that might otherwise be considered trivial (courses in soap opera and games shows, for example), I don’t have the hangup about a course sounding serious. When I taught Cyberporn & Society, some people said students wouldn’t sign up because they wouldn’t want that course title on their transcript. I got a number of other suggestions that would raise fewer red flags, so to speak; things like “Historical and Technological Effects of Erotica,” which, once appropriately truncated, would save embarrassment. Of course, I would find it embarrassing to avoid naming a course what it is about.
But it’s more than that. Why, as professors, should we not want to “sell” our courses. If you were a student would you rather take a course–to take an example from that list–entitled “Introduction to Material Culture” or would you be more likely to sign up for “Sex, Rugs, Salt & Coal.” I know which I would pick. And yes, it’s because I’ll expect the latter to be more entertaining, more fun. Is there something wrong with that expectation?
My greatest teaching weakness (among many, I assure you–soon I will share my most recent student reviews with you), is that I can’t stand (a) teaching from a text and (b) recycling courses. The idea of planning a course and then teaching it several times did not, until recently, appeal to me. Now I am getting into re-usable objects for teaching, and particularly online, that makes a lot of sense. But I am very much a fan of the one-off course, a course that organizes the material in an idiosyncratic way to appeal to an audience of students. I’m also a fan of extreme user-driven courses. Although I had an agenda for our “Communication, Media, and Society” course this semester, in past semesters, I’ve gone in and we’ve assembled the syllabus on the first day of class, according to what the students wanted. I expect I will do something similar when I teach it in the fall.
Traditional curricula tend to mess with this. We have a core set of courses we have to teach, and significant changes to that core actually have to go through a state board (even though we are a private university–go figure). My Cyberporn & Society course was a bit of a Trojan Horse. It took a salacious topic and used it to talk about some pretty core issues in communication research. Sure, it was about cyberporn, but it also provided a back door to talking about the effects of media (Does pornography cause rape? What do we mean when we say “cause”? How can we measure social effects?), the role of regulation (Why do we have a First Amendment? Should free speech cover non-political speech, and why? What are the limits on how communication law can be structured and enforced?), and the relationship of technology to society (What role did the sale of pornography play in the diffusion of VCRs? Did increased router sales lead to the wider distribution and acceptance of pornography, or was the relationship the other way around?). Sure, that’s a little “sneaky,” but it is also the way good classes work. I still remember the lessons of professors who bothered to make their material interesting. Unfortunately, this leads to a bit of a gap between what the catalog copy says, and what you do (or can do) in a course.
Vive la special topics course! When I am king, students will be allowed to major in “special topics,” and choose from only the interesting courses on a campus.
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