.museum domains held in the US

http://index.museum/land.php?country=US&lang=uk

by larrys • 13 years ago

23 22 13 years ago

SeanLuke• 13 years ago

Given that it already has a completely unique domain name (si.edu), smithsonian.museum seems overkill.

From a technical POV. But from a human POV, having 'smithsonian.museum' on their signage or advertising could be a win (assuming it's obvious it's a Web address).

dave5104• 13 years ago

Something like this has always worried me with ICANN's idea of opening up TLDs. It feels like a decade ago, most advertisements contained the "www." prefix to signify a web address. Nowadays, you rarely see them, since most people know what to do with a .com, .org, etc.

Once the TLDs open up, will we need to go back to using a "www." to signify this is a domain?

kylec• 13 years ago

I never got why .museum was created, it's way too long and obscure to be effective for domain names. Even shortening it to .mus or something would be a big improvement, but it seems like a lot of museums are using the more commonly known .org or .edu anyways.

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

More semantic domain names.

Chicago.museum

duskwuff• 13 years ago

It was proposed in the Yahoo! Directory era - that is, during a period of time in which it made sense to try to build a hierarchical index of the Internet. By the time .museum was actually approved and implemented, though, crawler-based indexes were already rising to dominance, so the TLD basically missed its chance at relevance.

rogerhoward• 13 years ago

As others pointed out, this was a different era - more the Yahoo era than Google's, when organizing the Web still seemed (to some) an attainable goal. I worked for the guy behind this at the time, though not on this project, and it seemed very odd to me even then... this is not only a product of its time, but very much a product of the unique and quirky museum technology culture.

Shorter names weren't seen as necessarily good - at least within some of the conversations around this TLD's inception there was some scorn for the overly techie, terse TLDs and domain names.

magic_haze• 13 years ago

I wasn't aware the museum technology culture was even a thing. It definitely seems... quirky, though: just look at the list of domains for the JFK museum:

    thesixthfloor.jfk.museum
    dallas.jfk.museum
    dealey.plaza.museum
    dealeyplaza.kennedy.assassination.museum
    dealey.plaza.assassination.museum
    dealey.plaza.jfk.museum

LeafStorm• 13 years ago

I noticed http://northcarolina.history.museum/ in the listing. I clicked it, and it resolves to an IP that is no longer routable. http://asheville.art.museum/ suffered a similar fate, and http://ncmls.durham.museum/ immediately redirected to http://lifeandscience.org/.

I imagine a lot of these were purchased as "Hey! There's a .museum top-level domain! Let's buy it! ...You know, we should probably write this down somewhere."

mistermumble• 13 years ago

This is similar to .travel top-level domain. Someone thought it was a good idea, just like .museum.

Since 2006, the travel.travel registry has sold 200,000 .travel domains. I am a heavy user of travel sites (Expedia, Hipmunk, hotel sites, etc). I have never, in the course of my online usage, ever run into a .travel site.

This is why gTLDs are likely to fail. At least for users and for purchasers of subdomains, not necessarily for the registrars.

EDIT: added Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.travel

markdown• 13 years ago

The national tourism bureau where I live recently switched to http://www.fiji.travel/

Strangely enough, they kept the www

joe5150• 13 years ago

The VMFA in Richmond, on the other hand, has a perfectly functional .museum domain, http://vmfa.museum.

Mankhool• 13 years ago

This is the longest one. national.healthandmedicine.washingtondc.museum It redirects to a real estate site in Spokane.

donretag• 13 years ago

The 'lang' param at the end of the url is interesting. The English content is 'uk' not 'en' or 'us'. The values seem to be country codes.

Changing the param to a different country only changes the name of the country, nothing else:

country=US&lang=es ==> .museum names held in Estados Unidos:

country=DK&lang=it ==> .museum names held in Danimarca:

.museum domains held in the US

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