When that raft of new Top Level Domains (TLDs) floated in the other week I jokingly ended my post by making a speculative quip about when the .ninja and .rockstar TLDs would make an appearance. I even knocked up a quick graphic image to accompany my post.
My reason for the mention was that whole “ninja” and “rockstar” tagging of people’s job descriptions was funny the first time I heard it but it seems to have seeped so deeply into the web industry vernacular that its stayed alive for many years now.
It’s a little bit like when Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker “sent up” the web design community in their classic Channel 4 comedy series Nathan Barley with such phrases as “well weapon” to praise the Wasp T-12 mobile phone and “stay futile” as a parting shot.
So yes, referring to oneself as a ninja or a rockstar is a bit silly in my opinion, hence the mention of the aforementioned as domain names.
But I’m not the only one to have noticed this and made my thoughts public. Here’s a tweet I favourited over 3 years ago now and it’s still current today:
Dear SEO community. Please stop referring to each other as “rockstars” and “ninjas”, it makes all of us sound like twats. Yours, Richard X
— Richard Shove (@RichardShove) January 26, 2011
The funny thing about joking about the .ninja domain is… that it actually exists! The first I heard about it was when I received a marketing email from a domain name vendor urging me to reserve my new .ninja domain name. On further inspection, these TLDs have “been in the system” since December of last year, are for sale now (GoDaddy announced the .ninja domain name sale yesterday, that’s April 1st – Make of that what you will) and the .ninja domain names will be live in May, apparently.
So this time I’m not going to say anything about the possible next TLDs because, it seems, anything goes. OK, I retract that statement, I can’t help but speculate – When will we be able to make up and purchase our own domain name extensions?