We are now Global Neighbourhoods.net

I have often quipped that I have a master's degree in blog typos. It seems this carried over to my filling out the form to register my domain with GoDaddy.com several months ago.

I registered Global Neighourhoods.com, not Global Neighborhoods.  The GoDaddy folk then redirected Global Neighborhoods to my core blog url of RedCouch.typepad.com. Are you with me so far?

Then nearly a year goes by until today.  When somebody--actually a new business prospect--tells me that when she types in my url she gets directed to a link farm. Crisply, I tell her she forgot the "u" and send her back.  She goes back and then tells me there was no typo.
Quickly I post the previous warning. The I dial up GoDaddy, preparing to use my most assertive voice in the key of shriek. As happens whenever I call GoDaddy, I reach a real human in support in a very short time, perhaps two minutes. As usual, he's brief and sharp in confirming that I am me. I relate the problem. He asks me to hold and comes back to tell me that I had typoed my domain name.

The way Link Farms work is simple and nasty. They use computers to find available URLs and they register them. Then they use the redirected traffic to sell advertising and to sell URLs to people who want to use them for legitimate business. When I tried to buy Global Neighborhoods.com at the beginning of this journey, they asking price was $10,000.  I countered with a$1 offer and the deal was never consummated.

"Don't feel badly," my GoDaddy guy tells me. "This mistake has been made by thousands of people,"he tells me. Yeah, but hw many people does GoDaddy register?

"Quite a few million," he tells me, which puts me in that one percentile club that I didn't want to join.

So, I register http://globalneighbourhoods.net and put a forward on it, which should kick in sometime in the next 24 hours. As residual winner here is Hugh Macleod
because now I have to buy a few thousand new Street cards from him with the .net replacing .com.

We now return to our regularly scheduled day.

Comments

[christina]

hope you grabbed http://globalneighborhoods.net while you were there...