I really hope that top level domain names aren’t opened up as planned. At present, there is a certain beauty in invention of a great domain name when all the good ones appear to have been taken. New words have been created, old words adapted. Web 2.0 was defined largely by its punkish denial of formal language with its flickr and del.icio.us, just as the first dotcom boom was redefining names like boo and egg. Rather than open a pandora’s box endless list of possibilities like .shop or .books or .you or .cotton, why not turf out all the cybersquatters who make a living from people typing in words like sex.com in the hope of accessing the web’s adult resources.
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I stayed up late last night deleting every extraneous application on my evil vista laptop. I originally bought it to be a modern typewriter, used solely for writing but I gradually started accumulating applications like fireworks, firefox, filezilla, GTA:III, until it was as bloated with distractions as everything. So last night I had a purge, almost to the point of deleting the internet itself.
I used to worry that I was addicted to the internet. Then I got myself a job that forced me to be in front of a web browser for at least 7 hours a day. My addiction became socially acceptable by getting paid for it. What worries me is that the addictive parts of my internet habits (the things I do instinctually rather than consciously) are all so dull: facebook, stats, guardian football, and others. None of these are particularly engaging. I may have to go on another diet.
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