After having spent four years obsessing about domain names during my tenure at Network Solutions, I briefly walked away from the whole “virtual real estate” concept. No longer – I slipped today, and it proves the level of my geekdom, at least according to one of my colleagues.

Did I register 40k domain names? Was I perusing the pending renewal lists at NetSol trying to find the perfect used domain?

No. It was the Virginia DMV site that caught my attention. One of the joys of living in Virginia is that vanity license plates are really inexpensive, and they have a ton of different designs. For the past eight years I have made Virginia my home, and (more importantly) the Northern Virginia roads my daily parking lot. One of the few interesting pass-times in the morning traffic is trying to guess what the vanity plates mean. Some are pretty obvious, like HOTMS or MOMTAXI. Others are not as obvious – and have GOT to be in a foreign language. Since I don’t know this for sure, I won’t copy any here (just to keep the post G-rated).

So, what was I doing on the Virginia DMV site? Yes – I was buying my own mobile advertising! For only $40, I get a 16″ (or so) wide banner placement for two years. Fixed placement – significant reach (Northern Virginia is quite populated) and great frequency.

Here’s my new advertisement.

In about two weeks, I will be sporting a lovely new advertisement for PRWeb.

  Of course, I don’t think I will be able to charge advertising fees to myself – but it will be interesting to see whether my newest approach will get any traction in my market. And for $40, if it results in one sale – well, it will have a great ROI! Now, how can I append Google Analytics tagging to my car?

At about 10 am, as I was putting together my daily numbers, Adwords returned a 404 error.

Analytics returned a 404 error.

Thinking that someone may have had fun with my bookmarks, I went to Google to validate the URLs.

Google returned a 404 error.

Checked again. Another 404 error.

So I went to my second favorite “hot topic” search engine – Twitter (tag is #googlefail). Seems that Google and AT&T were not playing well together, and Google was not available in a number of major metropolitan areas globally. Just out of curiosity, I sent a quick IM to a friend to see whether they were having problems – Google was fine in St. Louis (at that point). I went back to Twitter and found that there were other people having problems in different areas. I also saw a number of new theories about what was causing the problem.

At about 10:45, Google was working again, but continued to have some challenges with slow load times in both Adwords and Analytics.

Even with the Twitter storm, IMs, blog posts, and emails on the topic, the absolute best comment is one that I overheard IRL (in real life) from one of the sales people who work in the same office.

Oh my God! Google’s broken. Is the world ending?

Don’t think we’re suffering through the Apocalypse, but it definitely made for an interesting morning.

Now I just wish I had the foresight to screen capture www.google.com with a lovely 404 page showing.

After giving Google a while to even out, I checked on my Adwords campaigns to see what was going on. Although conversions are down a very little bit (read in the .2 – .3% range),  cost per conversion today has been about 35% LOWER than it normally is.  Do you think my Google rep would be upset if I asked her to set up day-parting and geo-targeting to mirror the rolling Google outage?

I just finished doing some research about whether a .biz or .com TLD was going to affect SEO results. Since it’s not practical to do a test before I can send a response, i did a bunch of digging.

Seems like it’s a hot topic – but don’t see too many people having any impiric evidence of value one way or the other. 

HOWEVER – I did read that there seems to be a preference for .edu and .gov TLDs (top level domains). So, here’s my plan. Since I will never get a .edu TLD, I am going to go for a .gov.

How, do you ask, can I get a .gov? Well the plan is this. Create my own sovereign nation! That’s right! A friend of mine who works at the World Bank once recommended that this wasn’t nearly as difficult to do as one might think! And if I become the monarch of say, Ebuzzeria, in either the Caribbean or Pacific Islands, I could justify getting a .gov TLD!

There are also other benefits to declaring my own country. For instance, I would own 200 mile fishing rights radius, and could charge people to fish in my waters. I could also join the United Nations, and become friendly with nations who might invest a bit in having me swing a vote their way.

Now the downside to this plan is that I have to find said deserted island (and, yes ISLAND – it has to have fresh water and the ability to grow food), then I have to LIVE on this island. Warm island. Soft breezes. Palm trees. Wait. That is definitely NOT the downside!

So, that’s my plan for world-domination. Or at least how I can get a .gov TLD. I’ll keep you up to date on how that works – or keep an eye on my URL, above…