👓 What’s In a Domain Name? | Extend Activity Bank

Read What’s In a Domain Name? by Khürt Williams (Extend Activity Bank)

Although I don’t write much about the topic on my website, I love science fiction, especially cyber-punk and Japanese anime and superhero graphic novels. One of my favourite cyberpunk novels in the early 1990s was a novel, Islands in the Net, written in 1988 by science fiction author, Bruce Sterling.

Islands in the Net is a story of “…data pirates, mercenaries, nanotechnology, weaponry, and post-millennial voodoo”. It represents a future where people can use the Internet to topple governments, change lives and make history. That novel was prescient in many ways.

In 2001 I ventured out on my own as an independent consultant, working on web development and system integration etc. It was also the same year that I started blogging. In 2003, I made a pivoted my skill set to cyber-security. With my keen interest in vulnerability assessment and finding and exploiting the weakness in information systems (aka penetration testing), my blog content changed. I started thinking and writing more about what I was learning, and I felt like I was living in that world described in the novel, Islands in the Net. It was also the same year that I decided that I wanted a domain name for my website.

My new career in cyber-security and my search for a domain name got me thinking about how I felt about my writing at the time. My blog was/is like a small island in the vast ocean of the Internet, where I shared my thoughts about anything and everything hacking related. Once I had the word island on my mind, I started thinking about the actual island in the West Indies where I was born and spent my pre-adult years. The West Indies is famous for its era of piracy which lasted from circa 1650 until the mid-1720s. Suddenly with my mind swirling with thoughts of the Internet, islands, and hacking, I remembered the Bruce Sterling novel.

The name of the blog, Island in the Net came to mind, and I went looking for a domain name. The domain, islandinthe.net was taken (and still is). I settled on islandinthenet.com.