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.

Four tech guys living in an apartment in downtown San Francisco have just launched Justin.tv, a site where you can watch the world through the lens of a camera strapped onto the helmet of one Justin Kan. Live. Twenty-four hours a day. Even when he’s taking a leak. Apparently until either you, or Justin, cease to exist.

Oh, and you can also chat about it in real time with others who are doing the same thing, or watch highlights of his life. Or you could call Justin directly. Go ahead! His number, posted on the site, is 415-948-3219.

Justin was formerly the founder of Kiko, a now defunct online calendaring company that he started two years ago and was funded by Paul Graham’s early stage fund, Y Combinator. They ended up selling the assets of the company for $258,000 on ebay, and now Paul’s back as the financier behind Justin.tv.

So, what’s it like watching Justin’s life? Well, he mostly goes around meeting with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other twenty-somethings hanging out in SF. A few days ago the cops showed up at his apartment in response to a prank caller claiming there was some bad sh*t going down. Oh, and there was the night when all his buddies tried to push some site to the top of digg. Not exactly HBO.

But the interesting thing here is that the guys behind Justin.tv are apparently using the web site to test out their technology and garner some publicity so that in the future, when they launch their *real* business, we’ll all be able to stream our lives to the world 24/7 wherever we may be. Think about how awesome that will be. Um… yeah.

Are these guys brilliant marketers? According to Alexa, Justin.tv has skyrocketed after only being live for seven days to a traffic rank of 3,086. Not bad, really. And the media is flocking…who wouldn’t want to write a story about these guys…inevitably it makes us all ask the question, “(Why) Would people want to watch my life 24 hours a day?”

Or is Justin.tv going to end like the story of the man who had his name legally changed to dotcomguy, and locked himself in his house in January 2000 for a year with a few dozen web cams and a laptop with an Internet connection, so all the world could watch him…um…shop online.

Dotcomguy also generated massive publicity, and was reportedly getting about 20 million page views a day on his site the first month he went live. But by the time he finally emerged from his house a year later and rode off on his moped, the sponsors funding his adventure had reneged on their commitments and dotcomguy had become a joke within the tech community.

The most popular video in the blogosphere right now is this one by Michael Wesch (see http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro…), Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

It’s pretty awesome - worth spending the next five minutes of your life watching, no matter who you are.

I’ve got to give a shout-out to the guys at 37 Signals here.

They have written, as far as I’m concerned, the best book in existence on how to develop a web app, called Getting Real. This book is fun and easy to read - you can bang it out in a day - but it’s the type of book you’ll constantly be referring back to as you work to build the perfect app. Here’s a peek:

Decisions are temporary so make the call and move on
Done. Start to think of it as a magical word. When you get to done it means something’s been accomplished. A decision has been made and you can move on. Done means you’re building momentum.

But wait, what if you screw up and make the wrong call? It’s ok. This isn’t brain surgery, it’s a web app. As we keep saying, you’ll likely have to revisit features and ideas multiple times during the process anyway. No matter how much you plan you’re likely to get half wrong anyway. So don’t do the “paralyis through analysis” thing. That only slows progress and saps morale.

Instead, value the importance of moving on and moving forward. Get in the rhythm of making decisions. Make a quick, simple call and then go back and change that decision if it doesn’t work out.

Accept that decisions are temporary. Accept that mistakes will happen and realize it’s no big deal as long as you can correct them quickly. Execute, build momentum, and move on.

Brilliant. I just decided I’m going to read this thing a fourth time starting tonight! And they’ve also recently made it available for free online for all you penny-pinchers.

I’m reading a book right now that is a real page turner - The Cluetrain Manifesto.

I’m not quite done yet, but this is one of the best thing i’ve read on how the Internet is changing the world and the implications for commerce.

Here’s a quote that just resonates:

Markets are conversations; and
Conversation is fire. Therefore,
Marketing is arson.

Marketing has come to be about the stuff business moves, not about the stuff that moves business - ideas. Talk that lasts is about stuff we can’t stop talking about. In other words, what makes the most meaningful ideas combustible is also what makes them inextinguishable.

If this is something you are remotely interested in or make a living from, I’d buy this book right now - I guarantee it will be $14 very well spent. You can even read the whole thing for free online here.

I’d like to thank my new friend Claude Benard, who writes the leading French travel 2.0 blog Les Explorers, for introducing his readers to VibeAgent.

Claude’s blog is mostly in French, but for all of us linguistically-challenged Americans, many of the interviews Claude conducts with travel 2.0 entrepreneurs are in English.

Thanks again Claude!