Moral of the story first: don’t let your private website expire.
If you do, someone in China, Nigeria or Viet Nam may buy the name of the site and sell ad space on it. This is what happend to Ari Siletz.com. My expired site is now pushing hair loss products, acne medicine, jewelry and loan services! Worse yet, it’s the first site that comes up on Google under my name. Serves me right perhaps, because I left the web property unattended while living in Iranian.com all these years and some one-man ad company in Zimbabwe or wherever squatted in it. On the other hand, after talking with my old webmaster he said there’s nothing I could have done about it anyway. In order not to have your website name squatted on, it used to be you bought yourname.com, and also yourname.net, yourname.org and a couple of others with the youname in different domains. Even if you only used yourname.com someone could potentially impersonate you with yourname.org, for example. So you coughed up the extra Dollars just to reserve those extra names. These days though, yourname dot anything is possible and there isn’t enough money in the world to reserve all the possible variations on the impersonation game.
The burden therefore is now on the visitor to recognize that he/she is actually on a spam site rather than on the intended website. I did say the moral of the story is not to let your private website expire, but morals is not the real purpose of this blog; it’s really about the burden on the visitor that we just talked about. More and more lately when I visit Iranian.com I take on that burden as I double check the URL to make sure I’m not on a spam site. I’m not talking about the obvious advertisements, I’m talking about how more and more the user contributed content has become no holds barred propaganda and unabashed misrepresentation.
Am I even on the right website?
