discredit.org

During this holiday weekend, I received the November 2008 issue of Modern Domainer.  There are a couple of topics listed in the magazine that I just skipped over.  How many domain conferences can you continue to write about?  Before chucking the magazine into the garbage, I noticed a section entitled “The Domainer Apprentice Challenge.”  What an intriguing topic, first there was Donald Trump, then there was Martha Stewart and now in our industry we have Donny Simonton.  If the third name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s quite alright.  You would be one of the many readers who had the same dumbfounded look as I had when reading the article.  To bring you up to speed, Donny Simonton is the chief technical officer of Parked.com.  Yes I used the P word, the same Parked.com that was visited by a domain chef from a domain name kitchen of some sort.  Yes, our industry has some interesting characters these days.  Anywho, back to the topic.  Since we have already touched base on Donny “Trump” lets proceed forward to the apprentices!

Soon-Jong Lee

Computer Science student at a major California University.  (It would be nice if they could tell us which one that might be, COUGH!)

Jose Martinez-Villalobos

Bartender who promises not to register domains while driving.

Derek Turner

Graphics designer looking to achieve financial security for his retirement years.  He saw an ad for the challenge in Modern Domainer.  Now that’s ironic.

Clarence Celestine

A cable installer from Baton Rouge.  Will install cable for domains, if that’s the case please make a trip out to Los Angeles in the near future.

Samantha Falcon

College student who works tech support for a telco company.  And as soon as she first heard about the domaining industry she picked up a subscription to Modern Domainer.

Now that I have covered all of the Domainer Apprentices for 2008, lets talk about what they all seem to have in common.  Well for starters they all became subscribers of Modern Domainer.  Let me ask this question, if this was to be a real challenge, does it matter if an apprentice has subscribed to Modern Domainer or not?  I will leave this question up to you to answer.  The other commonality that the apprentices have are related to generating more income.  I have to pose another question, domaining for the pure purpose of generating money seems to be a folly.  The truth is in the pudding and when I say pudding, more money is generated in this industry by the services and tools which are ingrained in it!  A person who enters into this industry at this time purely to generate more income will be at a loss.  With this being said, this Modern Domainer Apprentice Challenge just doesn’t make the cut in my books.  It is misleading, bias and creates a false impression of what our industry is truly about.  Money is not what built this industry, it is the pure essence of what has destroyed it.  Simply selecting an Apprentice Mentor that work’s for one of the top advertisers in the magazine is completely backwards.  Not to raise suspicions but come on guys, couldn’t you have created an honest  challenge as opposed to one which was fixed from the start?  Just my rant, back to enjoying the holidays.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Jason Thompson

I’ve been experimenting with a few tools out there, one of them being a plug-in for the firefox browser called iMacros. The plug-in allows you to record different operations you conduct with both your mouse and keyboard. For me the iMacros plugin was tested on the justdropped.com website to automate the task of searching for domains with the word forum or talk in them. This plug-in would help me from having to depend on a virtual assistant as I did not have much luck with that in the past. I’ve only tested it for a day or so, but the problem that I am currently having is it has a hard time getting past certain points in the justdropped.com website, causing the browser operations to halt. Since this is the case I can only get to a certain point before I have to take over myself and conduct the operations I need done. Justdropped.com has a great feature now, that allows you to email customized lists fitting the fields you have asked for directly to your inbox. I was using iMacros to have those list auto generated then sent to me. I am confident that with a little more testing that I will be able to have those lists sent to me automatically without having to depend on someone else to do it for me.

Best Regards,

Jason Thompson

This month has been quite a busy one for me with several different projects on the table and of course the epic search for acquiring as many quality forum based domains as humanly possible.  During my time lapse, I didn’t have much time to actually log into my blog and update it or view any important comments that my readers have posted.  To much of my surprise after logging in a few minutes ago, I noticed there were a great deal of comments waiting for me to flag.  Over 50 comments total!  Of course, I get excited easy when it comes to an online project so there was no stopping me now.  I went through and scanned each comment and they were all spam messages!  Only one didn’t survive the chopping block of my fearless mouse clicking.  Anyhow onto bigger and better things, I’ve got some great news to post on the blog and I am definitely looking forward to sharing it with everyone.  Back to the projects as I definitely want to be able to talk about this news soon.  Perhaps I will publish my entire portfolio for the world to see, infact I know I will.

Best Regards,

Jason Thompson