Use Dotster.com, it is only going to cost about $10 a year for a domain. If you are interested in a branding opportunity online, it starts there. Dotster.com has a fast, and easy, interface. Minimal push sales through the domain registration pages. This is NOT like goDaddy. I don’t like their interface at all.
If you are curious about trademark issues, visit USPTO.GOV, there is a search function on the left hand side. Pretty straight forward. Do a search if you want to minimize the risk of a lawsuit for trademark infringement or a cyber-squatting fiasco.
Those two are where I go when I start a project. I currently have 100 domains, each relate to a project with a specific purpose/goal in mind. I’ve had greater and fewer than 100, but I have always had this goal of launching 100 businesses in a year. We’ll see if that happens… moving on.
Social Media sites are pretty much centered around the users interacting with the service instead of the service providing itself to the user. YouTube, for instance, is a social media site. Reddit is as well, so is Digg; the left and right of link aggregation. Search engines like the one Mahalo wanted to be, was powered by people to provide quality increases in the results. It shifted to a Wikipedia format this year. Seems good intentioned, but I don’t like the idea of compensating users with something other than cash/goods on a 1:1 ratio. Mahalo has an interesting business model. I’m interested in how it works for the management team.
In all of these cases, and more, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn; You have to capture YOUR brand as an individual. Not just your business identity. If you want to maintain your brand recognition [search for James Hatch on Google, depending on your search trends, I'll be in the top 5, usually behind the Professor], you must capture your name. So, I own my name www.JamesHatch.com and my spouses name. I own the domains for my projects, as well as some of them on Twitter. I also own my name on Google. Albeit sometimes it requires me to include my middle name… I’ll be first in line to grab my non-full name when the opportunity arises with other services. If you look to the right, the third panel contains the places I visit or own, and have my name brand.
One of my projects: MobWatch.com [which I don't advertise] is an online reputation manager. Basically, the idea is to allow individuals to link to the profiles on other sites, and discuss the personality and actions of the user outside of that site. I intend to make it so that identical names can be pulled up, and everyone can analyze the tone and nature of the online persona’s to see if they are one in the same. Obviously it is not a scientific analysis, but is might present some interesting results.
Another project: JDrater.com [again, I don't advertise] is a rating and review site intended for individuals to comment on how they were treated by attorney’s and firms. It follows on the same platform as MobWatch in terms of interface. I love social aggregation, the idea of mob rule is fascinating. Attorney friends say that the jury gets it right whereas individual decision making fails due to bias. The problem is that the jury sometimes gets its wrong. I’m interested, as an offshoot of JDrater development, if the size of the jury makes a difference. According to my marketing research professor, as it applies to sampling… the size of the sample shouldn’t make a difference.
More to come… I just needed to break from reading code. I’m starting to respond in a series of short beeps and whistles.