Giving an online Identity to the masses

Jason Kolb has recently been discussing here how the internet is forming an integral part of our lives. He further goes on to describe (here) his quite ingenious plan for giving out domain names to the masses. Not top-level domains as current internet savvy people have, but sub-domains that the ordinary “Joe Public” can have. As Jason states:

“Obviously, it’s not feasible to expect the general public to pay $7.99
a year for something as abstract as a domain name.  The only way to
really make this happen, I realized, is to give them away.  However,
it’s not realistic to think that there’s any possible way to buy
everyone on earth a domain name.  The registration fees alone would
just be massive.  However, you can give away sub-domain names, for absolutely nothing.”

What a great idea Jason! I can’t believe that no-one has thought of this before but it does appear that you are the first.

Not only does this make sense to allow more people to gain their own “online presence” but also removes the problem of finding unique top-level domain names. I know this too well already. Recently, I have jumped on the domain name ownership list by deciding to host my own online presence. When I went looking for a domain name to use I tried to two obvious ones (well obvious to me):

www.toal.com
www.paultoal.com

Both were already registered. Therefore, as you will see if you are reading this, I ended up opting for

www.pdtoal.com

What Jason is doing is minimising this problem. However, how long before I can’t register paultoal.atmy.name or pdtoal.myidentity.name because someone else has got them

DON’T FORGET MY BLOG HAS NOW MOVED TO HTTP://BLOG.PDTOAL.COM