If you’re like most online veterans, you probably like buying domain names for fun and profit. I know I do. I’ve been doing it for about twelve years now.

But it was not until very recently, as in about like 10 minutes ago, that i realized this: how I end up buying domain names is probably very different than the way you do. Read on, and then if you want you can share your opinions in favor or to the contrary in the comments, or win a shiny new domain name.

That is, if you’re a real a person and not some robot spider sent by Google.

Many of us buy a domain name because we think somebody else might want it later, or perhaps somebody forgot to do something obvious, like register their own name or company or slogan or whatever.

I guess I might do that sometimes. But that’s usually when the domain name doesn’t end up being worth much.

I usually come at the whole domain thing a little differently. Usually when I decide to buy a domain name it is because there’s that semblance of a seemingly marketable idea bouncing around my head and I think I might as well go ahead and buy a little insurance policy on that idea. Like a $10 policy. $50 if i want the 5 year one.

Who knows, maybe it was a great idea. Maybe in 4 or 7 or 10 years I’ll circle back to that idea and think; right time, right place. Let’s do this. Or you will. No worries, you can have it. If it is the right time, right place for you, then I would be happy to contribute to that. Redirect and transfer!

Then I will have given someone a present while having a new story to tell…for $10 - what a bargain!

So here’s a little sample of five particular gems i’m sitting on right now. If you have a good idea for using one of these things, tell me below. If I like it, the domain is yours, free. My call.

feedbreaker.com
pillowbank.com
snufflebug.com
tastemakr.com
scubapals.com

Twitter is like crack for people with ADD.
Which, it turns out, includes like OMG everybody younger than me, several big name bloggers and at least one presidential candidate.

Twitter is like junk food for small, self-absorbed brains.
Because it’s all about telling a group of people what you’re doing right now, all the time…not conversing, mind you; more like shouting at a party to no one in particular about whatever random nonsense that’s popped into your head at that moment.

Twitter is…the perfect storm.
For those of you Luddites that haven’t yet heard of the twitter phenomenon, and it does seem to be evolving into a phenomenon, let me give you a quick update.

Twitter is a new web service founded by Evan Williams and Biz Stone. The two previously collaborated at Pyra Labs, the company behind the blogging platform Blogger, that was acquired by Google in February 2003 (pre-IPO) for an undisclosed sum.

Interestingly, last October Evan was somehow able to buy out venture capitalists Charles River and all the other initial investors into Odeo, which at the time was the company that built and owned the applications odeo and twitter. The new company he formed to do this buy-out, Obvious Corp, in which Biz Stone and other former Odeo employees are also shareholders, then sold the odeo application to Sonic Mountain for about a million bucks last week, allowing them to focus their full resources on the burgeoning twitter phenomenon.

How does twitter work? Well, you add your friends on the site, and then start posting what you’re doing via the web, your IM client, or text message from your cell phone. That message then gets distributed to all your friends and followers through their chosen channel. That’s it. That’s twitter.

So like, you can totally be in touch with all your peeps 24/7, sharing such intimate moments as, “OMG brushing my teeth!” “LOL driving to work!” and “ROFL taking out trash!” Honestly, what could be better than that!

But remember, you’re not only sharing these intimate moments with others…they’re sharing them with you! So you also get notified when anyone in your network is “OMG brushing my teeth!” “LOL driving to work!” and “ROFL taking out trash!” Brilliant.

You can probably tell by now that I don’t get it. But it’s not just me, it’s everyone I know. We don’t get it. We don’t want it. But what really makes this painful for me is….it makes me feel old.

This twitter thing has become a dividing line; generational, to a great extent, but more so, attitudinal and behavioral. How do we view technology? What is our need for connectedness? What is our desire for privacy? How do we seek out human contact? What is the length of our attention span?

For me, the growing twitterati symbolizes the dramatic shift taking place in the way people interact with and consume information in all its forms. The question becomes, what are the long-term implications of our collectively decreasing attention spans and collectively increasing propensity to multi-task?

Danny Hillis is the prescient founder of the Long Now Foundation, an organization established in 1996 to encourage people to think long-term.

The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

One of the foundation’s projects is to build a clock, that “ticks once a year, bongs once a century, with a cuckoo that comes out every millennium.” I’m pretty sure Danny Hillis isn’t on twitter.

New fMRI studies at Toronto’s Rotman Research Institute suggest that as we get older, we have more trouble tuning out background thoughts when turning to a new task. Great. So I am getting old.

Perhaps, deep down somewhere, I secretly wish I could get excited about this twitter thing, and start shooting off messages left and right about each revelation that passes across my synapses. But then again, maybe I’ll just go read a book. For better or worse, this bird don’t tweet.

Paul Graham, partner at early-stage investment fund Y Combinator and author of Hackers & Painters, argues in his essay How to be Silicon Valley that there are two essential ingredients for a place to successfully breed startups: rich people, and nerds. And because both groups are highly mobile, that is ALL you need. Fancy buildings don’t matter, because the crucial stage of a startup is when there are a few founders sitting around brainstorming, which can happen anywhere.

So if all you need are rich people and nerds, what attracts these two groups of people to any particular place? Well, Graham argues that above all, you need a world-class university - one that competes with the likes of Stanford and MIT - because smart people gravitate to where there are other smart people. And the second thing you need is a place where students will want to stay after they graduate and where rich people will want to live, a place with good weather and personality.

Charlottesville is an amazing place, and it would seem to fit the bill. Nicknamed The Hook, the town is best known as home to the University of Virginia, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. And C’ville was recently named the best place to live in America. The beautiful surroundings of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the college-town culture, an incredible music scene, great weather and a laidback atmosphere all help attract plenty of diverse, affluent people to the town. But for some reason, there are just not a lot of startups being created here. On this mashup by fourio, web 2.0 start-ups are mapped globally. There are none, until now, in Charlottesville. Why is that?

Simple. Charlottesville needs more nerds.

UVA’s graduate engineering school is ranked 37th nationally. Ouch. There’s the problem right there. Not great for a school that trades the Best U.S. Public University title back and forth with Berkeley and Michigan every few years. BTW, what’s Berkeley’s engineering school ranked? 3rd. Michigan’s? 9th. Double ouch. They’ve got more nerds.

UVA is in the middle of a $3 billion capital campaign right now which is targeting $150 million for the School of Engineering. Graham argues that to really change the landscape, UVA should take that money and recruit 50 top engineering professors with signing bonuses of $3 million each. It’s a bold move, but it would certainly change the playing field overnight and turn C’ville into a startup mecca.