UpFRONT

vi rocks. It also rules. So says Vassilii's Editors Sucks-Rules-O-Meter, which mines the verbs on Altavista and pronounces vi the winner over Emacs and all the other editors as a subject of those two superlatives. As of July 3, vi had a 350/10 rules/sucks ratio. And it looks like Linus isn't the only one out there who hates Emacs—a sentiment he shared with us on a recent panel that also featured Emacs creator Richard Stallman. Emacs' rules/sucks ratio is 22/59. This meter can be found at http://www.tarunz.org/~vassilii/srom/and is updated weekly. Thanks to Vassilii Khachaturov.

BARREL SCRAPINGS

Want a new domain name? Good luck. We are at the bottom of the .com barrel, and the .net and .org barrels must be getting fairly low too. While the urban legend says every word in the dictionary has been sold for .com use, “misstep” is still there. So is “dodder”. A lot of two-word combos (such as hunkerdown) are gone as well, but a few (such as stupiddog) are still there. But your chances of getting the domain you want are being reduced every second by the sharks who buy domains from Network Solutions for $70 and then sell them for far higher prices (up to millions of US$) to the unfortunates who came too late to buy direct.

Thus, your only two strategic naming choices are anonymous or strange—or both. Why not create a front company with a camouflage name like “Symnetix.com”, while your actual business will be an enterprise NT replacement service called “Bizfloss.com”? If you do that, remember who your friends are when you file for that IPO (initial public offering).

To save you a bit of work, I went through the familiar whois routine to scope out the possibilities. They are mighty slim. Let's say you are in the bug zapper business and want “bzzt.com”. Well, Allan Henning of Stockton, California has already grabbed that one. How about dropping a z? Nope; “bzt.com” belongs to Hovinga Holding in the Netherlands. How about adding a z? Wrong again; “bzzzt.com” has gone to the Mikluhomaklai Sensation Corp. in Omsk, Siberia. Okay, how about one more z? Voilà! You can have it. Now prepare to spend the rest of your business life saying, “that's bzzzzt.com with four Z's.”

—Doc Searls