This morning, J. Clifford wrote about the collections of people on two progressive social networking sites, commenting on how more people online seem interested in exploring and expressing who they are rather than connecting with people in order to find ways to do as activists. He wrote, “Macbeth talked about strutting and fretting on the stage without signifying anything. Yet, what would a life of mere signification be?”
Well, that got me thinking about the famous line from Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Out of this line, the most famous phrase is at the end: sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Out of curiosity, I wondered if anyone had used this phrase as inspiration for web sites, and if so, what those web sites might be like. So it was that I found SoundAndFury.com and SignifyingNothing.com.
Interestingly enough, there’s not actually anything at either domain name. Both point to other web sites.
SoundAndFury.com takes readers automatically to MusicMania.com, a site that in turn directs visitors to other web sites that sell things like MP3s, MP3 players, and sheet music. SignifyingNothing.com takes readers to an online publication that includes a blog and several MP3s that are no longer available.
Of the two, I’d say that SignifyingNothing.com has more actual sound and fury (even if its sounds are gone). At least the webmaster there has something to say. SoundAndFury.com signifies nothing to me. A web site ought to be a lot more than just a conduit.
In the long term, there’s going to have to be a better system for sites to get domain names. We’re just at the start of the development of this system now, and there’s been a big rush to grab words and phrases just because they’re well known, and people figure that must mean something. In the case of SignifyingNothing.com, the author seems to want to have something to say, but has picked a name that actually does suggest that he has little to say. In the case of SoundAndFury.com, the name is appropriate, but the content is rather contentless.
Of course, I don’t think it ought to be in my power, or anyone else’s power, to judge that a particular site design is not worthy of a domain name. Yet, will this early name grab stand for the entire next generation, or until the registrar dies, or can we move on to a new system, in which word turf is not quite so exclusive?
Such a system could be built: a directory lookup could return multiple results, and your browser would let you pick one. However, those names could not be used for HTML links, unless you want to see a “pick a result” dialog every time you click a link. There’d have to be two systems, the current DNS and the directory service you’re talking about….which, by an astonishing coincidence, is pretty close to what we have today, except that the directory service is Google. Many people, instead of guessing a domain name, search Google instead. It works pretty well; it doesn’t have any pay-to-play nature; and it’s resistant to squatters, since nobody links to their faux pages.
Except, what would happen if Google starts gaming the system – for political or economic reasons? How are we all to know? That’s a lot of power in one set of hands.
DNS could be cleaned up a lot, too. many things of only local interest have global-scope names, and there really aren’t enough global-scope TLDs. i would like to see .com become a wide assortment divided by business sector. we could have separate .food, .comm (communication), .car (or .auto), .toy, .law, .clo (clothing… maybe .fash?), etc. Then, .org could be restricted to non-profits; .net could be only domains that are about the internet itself. most of these would make sense to have globally for global scale companies, and also as subdomains within .us (or even within the states, e.g. farallon.food.ca.us) … though i am hesitant, despite the obvious benefits, of over-dividing geographically in a world where physical location means less and less. the global village economy is not just about tax evasion and sweatshop labor anymore.
Juniper, there is no known query system that would scale to the entire Internet and would not contain a central point of authority where someone could abuse their power.
Vynce, “DNS could be cleaned up a lot, too.” — by whom? Nobody has the authority to make this kind of decision–especially when you realize that you’d be breaking all of the links on the Web.
DNS used to have stricter requirements (.org was for non-profits; .net was for those providing network services; no entity was allowed to have more than one domain), but those went by the wayside as soon as there were fees to be collected.