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February 06, 2007, 04:26 PM ET
In Defense of '.um'
A while ago, we reported on the death of .um, an almost-completely unused domain name that had been set aside for the United States' "minor outlying islands." The domain had been kept alive by the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, but it evidently grew tired of maintaining something that was little more than an online oddity.
Now David A. Utter, writing for WebProNews, has stepped forward to argue that getting rid of .um was a big mistake. Think of the punny possibilities that the domain name presents: Cerebell.um, he suggests, "would have made a great name and domain for a neurology conference." Tedi.um, he adds, "could have been the home for another social networking site."
There's another reason that .um is worth saving: The domain name could help give those "minor outlying islands" a rare moment in the limelight. After all, they have a bizarrely fascinating history, says Duffy Gillman, a computing manager at the University of Arizona who was kind enough to drop us a line:
The story gets weirder yet -- the islands so grouped are specifically those claimed under the "Guano Act of 1856", which permits any US citizen to lay claim to "any island, rock, or key" on which a deposit of guano is found, provided no one else has claimed the island. That we have not had a surfeit of domain names like aquari.um, alumini.um, and ohandah.um, nor a rush of bat-dropping prospectors trolling the seas, clearly indicates the poor coverage these minor islands have received to date.The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which shut down the domain, says .um could be reactivated if some other institution decides to step up and take it over. --Brock Read
Categories: Research, Leadership
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