Looking for a recruiting domain? Here are 5700, unregistered!

Shorter domain names are better.  One syllable words are simple, short, and memorable. This weekend I was looking for a domain name for a new project I was working on.  Everything I initially tried was taken.  What I did know was that I wanted to add a one syllable word to the end of my “anchor word”.  It had nothing to do with recruiting, but for this example,  I will use the anchor word  RECRUIT.

I needed to create a repeatable, semi automated process to conquer this task.   Here is what I did:

1. Create a list of one-syllable words.  One of Broadlook’s software engineers, Kevin,  had developed an algorithm to do this.  It is a great thing when you have a team with 7 years of software code to pull off the shelf.

2. Pass this list of one-syllable words past a good set of text to get a frequency count.  Kevin suggested to run it past the Brown Corpus.   It was a good idea.  Once I had a frequency count, I could remove words of very low frequency from the list.  The end result was about 6100 one-syllable words

3.  Build a simple Excel spreadsheet.  The spreadsheet allows me to type in a single word and it will create about 6100 lines of potential domain names.    You can get this spreadsheet here at a site I set up.

4.  In batches of 500, paste them into GoDaddy’s bulk registration system.   All the domains that are already registered will be culled out of the results.

If you are looking for a domain name in the recruiting space, you can try RecruitWho.com, RecruitGo.com or RecruitGun.com.  All of these domains were available as of this writing.  Below is the full list of 5700 available domain names starting with the word RECRUIT.   Within this list are some good domains, and many very bad ones.  They are listed in the order of occurrence of the word in the  English language, starting with “the” being the most used.  While this may seem daunting, check your premises. Try manually thinking up a domain name, checking if it is available, and trying again, again and again  vs.  looking through this list.  This way is much faster.   If someone picks one from this list, let me know, I’d love to hear that I saved you time.  Go get em!

RECRUIT  THE.COM
RECRUIT  OF.COM
RECRUIT  AND.COM
RECRUIT  TO.COM
RECRUIT  THAT.COM
RECRUIT  IS.COM
RECRUIT  WAS.COM
RECRUIT  HE.COM
RECRUIT  FOR.COM
RECRUIT  HIS.COM
RECRUIT  BE.COM
RECRUIT  AT.COM
RECRUIT  BY.COM
RECRUIT  HAD.COM
RECRUIT  NOT.COM
RECRUIT  ARE.COM
RECRUIT  BUT.COM
RECRUIT  FROM.COM
RECRUIT  HAVE.COM
RECRUIT  THEY.COM
RECRUIT  AN.COM
RECRUIT  WHICH.COM
RECRUIT  WERE.COM
RECRUIT  SHE.COM
RECRUIT  WE.COM
RECRUIT  THERE.COM
RECRUIT  WOULD.COM
RECRUIT  THEIR.COM
RECRUIT  BEEN.COM
RECRUIT  HAS.COM
RECRUIT  WHEN.COM

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Picking a domain name; don’t be stupid, use a tool

Picking a domain name; don’t be stupid, use a tool

It is interesting and challenging to pick a new domain name.  At some point, it can get frustrating since everything you try to pick is already registered.  Here is some advice, use a tool.  You would not want to search the Internet by going to every building that is connected to the Internet and looking on each individual hard drive.  We use a tool.  Search engines.

Picking a domain name also has it’s tools.  My first step was to find a source of words.  I wanted short, common words. I found this resource of the top 100 words in the English language: http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/wordfrom/revisedcoed11/?view=uk

This gave me a source of data.  I captured the table from the webpage using Broadlook Eclipse (I don’t cut & paste) and exported a list to Excel.  Next, I visited a few of my favorite sites.   Nameboy.com and Bustaname.com.   With bustaname.com you put words into groups, and then bustaname creates permutations of available web domains.  Using this method I picked up whichwhen.com for $7.   Nice domain.  2 syllables, includes 2 of the top 100 words in the English language, and it rhymes.

Here is an example of what Bustaname.com looks like.  In this example,  you can see a small sub section of available domains based on top 100 words in English.

bustaname1 bustaname2

In my first hour of searching, manually, I tried over 50 domains, and none that I liked were available.  In the next hour I had my pick of about 5 domains I really liked.

Moral of the story: Whether you are picking a domain name or doing Internet Research,  don’t be stupid,  use a tool.

VMware; when you can’t even pay to get support; my personal tech support nightmare

It is rare that spend my valuable time with a complaint.  However, in my recent quest to get support for VMware fusion was met with a hard stop.   I have never been so amazed at the ramifications of a bad policy.

Here is what happened.  I use VMware fusion on my macbook pro to run a virtual windows vista environment.  I use that environment for software demos.  It needs to work.  I switched to a mac for ease of use (that is another blog).   Windows has a tendency to bloat…so my virtual environment ran out of space; I needed to increase the size of the virtual disk.   For one reason or another,  the standard disk-expanding procedure did not work.  Time *is* money, so I decided to call support to get it resolved.

Here is where the nightmare started.

When I called, I was prompted to press the # button for support for fusion.  I eventually got a message stating that there was online support only.  “Ok, I can understand that”, I said to myself.   I would just call back and let them know, I’m willing to pay for support to resolve this issue and get back to giving software demos.

I called back.

This time I pressed the series of buttons to get to a live person.

The nightmare intensified.

I was told that there is no phone support, even if I payed.  Never in my 25+ years in the industry has this happened to me.  I was shocked.   For those who know me…yes, I was speechless for a few moments.  I’ve had tough tech support cases at Broadlook, first when I started the company and I was sales, support, development and garbage man.  Now my tech support team handles everything under the sun.  We have never told a client “NO”.  Yes, sometimes, when there is an issue outside the realm of our software, we charge, we have to.  Sometimes we resolve firewall or Microsoft windows issues. It is not always our software, this is what paid support is for.   I was simply in disbelief.

My issue is still unresolved.  Where does this leave me?  This blog is “what keeps me up at night”.  This time it really will.  I will be re-installing Windows, adding all the software that my demo machine needs, transferring files from one session to another.

Here is my support ticket in case VMware cares: 1136362675

Here is the email of the manager who said “no”:  callum at vmware dot com

Notes to VMware.

-Microsoft, for all it’s faults, will help you if you pay for it.
-Support can be a revenue stream.  (said with a tone of Duhhh)
-If you treat your customers this way, competitors are going to eat your lunch, and I will enjoy watching it happen.  I don’t like being told no.
Parallels has an alternative to VMware fusion for the mac.  I called Parallels and asked if they had pay-for-support and they said absolutely.  In fact, the guy I talked to at Parallels was extremely helpful and also shocked when I shared the VMware fusion story.

At this point, I don’t want to work with VMware

Fast forward 3 months

I holded off posting this blog for about 3 months.  I switched to Parallels for mac which allows me to run a virtualized windows environment.  I wanted to wait until I had a problem and needed help with Parallels.  When I called Parallels support, I did have an issue that qualified for paid support.  The rep was probably surprised when I was enthusiastic and excited to pay for support.  In the end, I was not even charged, even though I was willing to pay.  My issue only took a minute to resolve and the tech support rep wished me well.

VMware: That is service.

Micro squatting: Domain squatting for the next decade

Micro squatting: Domain squatting for the next decade

domain-squatter

MICRO SQUATTING
Is your brand safe?

Getting a good domain that is a real word or combination of real words is almost impossible these days.  Now, for someone like me that has a new product idea every week or so, this poses a problem.  Sometimes I get “stuck” when I can’t either name a creation or get a good domain to put it on.

I’m done with picking real words.

I am one of those people that *refuse* to pay more than 7 bucks to GoDaddy to get a domain.  I won’t do it.  Paying for a domain that someone else squatted on it simply against my DNA.

Now I have no problem with domain farmers…that’s what I call them.  These people take a domain, build it to have some valuable content, and then sell it.  The squatters are the ones that do nothing, create nothing, they scarf up someones (trademark) in some cases and hope to play leech until they get blood (yes this happened to me).   He lost.

Sometimes, paying a squatter good coin is just unavoidable, however, many companies have simply avoided this trap by making up words.

Look to the future.

What is the equivalent of domain squatting now?  Where is the wide open frontier?  Here are some things on the horizon.

Username SEO: What happens if you create a username of wwwgooglecom?  or RecruitingSoftware?  Try it.

URL shorteners: most of us have seen http://tinyur.com and http://tr.im.  Both of these services are used widely in services like twitter, where cutting down a long URL can be important.  Both of these services now offer vanity URL’s.  For example try these:

http://tr.im/recuiting

http://tr.im/salesleads

http://tr.im/keywords

http://tinyurl.com/shally (I secured this one for a friend…and let him know about it)

Yes, I made sure I got these before someone else did.  I used each of these in a twitter post where cutting the URL to a reasonable size was important.  Am I saying that tr.im is the next big thing?  No. I am simply making a point.

Forum names:

Think about it.  What is the value of having the username BarackObama on facebook?

What is your brand or trademark?  Do you have the tinyURL, tr.im, facebook, etc for at least the important ones?

Spend 1 hour and secure them.  Don Ramer and his company Arbita does a great job in reversing the “brand highjacking” that happens when a company’s job postings start showing up first on aggregator sites like Indeed. For the large corporations that are unhappy when a google search with “Jobs” + “your company”  does not yield search results to your company… you need to call Don or George LaRocque, head of sales.

This is the large scale stuff… What about smaller stuff like a product name or trademark?

Perhaps there is an entirely new business model here to protect clients important product names.  For a fee:

-Secure the major trademark names & product names for all the major social media sites
-Wrap them up and turn them over to the user via a single-sign on interface
-Facilitate cross posting across all sites  (in many cases, you must keep accounts active to keep them)

This may exist already, but probably not in the form I am thinking here. There was a company called NameProtect.  From what I remember, they are reactionary to protecting a brand or trademark once a violation has occurred.  I’m talking more about a proactive approach to registering your brand under every major site, forum, etc.   This would be too hard for anyone to do themselves.  Ahh the wonders of automation.

Among my 12,000 readers… I can hear the vendors running to http://tr.im

Think I’m silly?   try this  http://tr.im/google and   http://tr.im/microsoft these are not owned or controlled by Microsoft or Google.

Hopefully they are really running now. Take this to the next level.  Shut eyes and think (after you read this senario):

1. Someone correctly secures a tr.im vanity URL and correctly assigns it to  salesforce.com.  So  http://tr.im/salesforce points to http://www.salesforce.com

2. He starts using twitter and does real tweets about salesforce, using the tr.im/salesforce   URL

3.  Others using twitter start using that URL to shorten their messages

4. Remember, someone controls that URL, not salesforce.  After that shortened link gets very popular, the one who controls it, changes it to point to netsuite.com  (a salesforce competitor)

5.  Brand highjacked!

Is your brand safe?

*Note: as to not have someone misuse salesforce.com brand in any way thinking I was suggesting it, I registered salesforce to point to the correct location of salesforce.com.
Keyword proximity and keyword extension engines

Keyword proximity and keyword extension engines

Here is an experiment to help develop taxonomies of keywords.

First engine is http://keywords.broadlook.com. The focus of this engine is the keywords and metatags within websites and build a list of (1) keyword extensions of your input. Example: if you type in the word “research”, the engine will return the top results in 1000’s of phrases that start with “research”, like “research and development”, “research papers” and “research triangle”. In addition, engine 1 returns a list of keywords in closest proximity to your input term.

Second engine is http://keywords2.broadlook.com. This engine does the same as engine #1, except it works with the BODY of html pages vs. keywords and meta tags.

 Blog Pictures | acobox.com

 

 

 

 

Building a ultra-fast proximity engine with entity recognition could yield some interesting results.

Examples:

-Who are the top 10 people on the web that are mentioned in closest proximity to Bill Gates or Barack Obama? How does that compare to the month previous?

-What are the top 10 companies mentioned near Broadlook or Salesforce.com?

-Who are the top 10 people mentioned in conjuntion with an event, company or date?

The combinations are endless. What applications can be developed from this type of information? I can think of many in the research and analytics space. The 2 main components are the entity recognition and proximity indexing. For questions about the engines email to donato dot diorio at gmail com with subject “keyword engine”

Please keep in mind that this is pure research and we are not even sure ourselves of the uses of the core technology.

Enjoy!

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