My Own Pirate Radio

I’m tired. I need help. I’ve been looking for available Internet domain names recently, and I’m finding it’s a desert out there… all the good stuff is gone.

What I need: given a set of prioritized naming requirements from yours truly, spit out candidate Internet domain names that are known to be available for registration. And make ‘em good, not silly names that nobody can spell, speak, or remember.

I’ve stumbled across a few products that claim to help, but they only offer crude syntactical options like prefix/suffix generation. The same goes for Network Solutions, GoDaddy, and other name registrars I’ve run across: their simplistic alternate name suggestions are a waste of time.

I would love to know of good software for this. Is Net Promoter worthwhile? There must be something passable out there… plenty of companies hold thousands of domain names, and surely they don’t pay staff to just sit around and dream up names all day. (Although I must admit that reminds me — painfully — of some branding exercises I’ve been through. Perhaps the truth is uglier than I think.)

Dennis Forbes just wrote an insightful and entertaining analysis titled “Interesting Facts About Domain Names” on exactly this topic. He downloaded and analyzed the .COM namespace, publishing findings including distribution of name lengths, availability of 2, 3, 4 and 5-letter names, and joins with the US Census list of popular male and female names. He also promises a follow-up, which I’ll be looking for. It’s nice work. Now if he would just package it as an online service….