Gervase Markham asks Who owns the alphabet?. Being more of a numbers guy myself, I was curious about digits. Similar disclaimers apply.
| First Hit | Description | Comment | Honourable Mentions (top 10) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | The W3C Validator | A free service that checks documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. | An appropriate start, perhaps due to XHTML 1.0? | Netscape, Microsoft, Business 2.0, an AOL error page (!) |
| 1 | The W3C Validator | A free service that checks documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. | Hmm. XHTML 1.0 and 1.1? | VH1, Bobby, Mozilla.org, BBC 1 |
| 2 | The W3C Validator | A free service…. | The W3 again. Weird coincidence? (Top10) Many others have found that having a 2 in your name doubles your fun (and PageRank, apparently). | Learn2.com, Internet2, Playstation.com |
| 3 | The W3C Validator | A free service and so forth. | And again the W3. Conspiracy, anyone? | 3Com, QuickTime, id. |
| 4 | The W3C Validator | Yadda yadda yadda. | This just isn’t funny any more. What, does the World Wide Web Consortium own Google? (Top10) Finally, some new contenders. | Macromedia, Microsoft, PHP, United States Postal Service |
| 5 | Macromedia | Servlet/JSP engines. | Description from their site. Oh, and a little thing called Flash, too. (Top10) All the old regulars. | Microsoft, Apple, Opera |
| 6 | Macromedia | Servlet/JSP engines. | Does anyone else sense a pattern? | Netscape, Microsoft, Motel 6, Adobe |
| 7 | Netscape | All NEW Netscape 7.0 – Netscape’s FASTEST browser! | (Top 10) Finally some new sites again. | Real, Jasc, 7-Eleven |
| 8 | Real | One easy way to play every major media format in one amazing Player. | (Top10) Wow. A Your browser sucks! page. I thought those were dead. | Super 8 Motels, ISC BIND, WinZip, SPring-8 (synchrotron), entropy8zuper.org |
| 9 | Number Nine | Number Nine Visual Technology has ceased operation. | The company has been out of business for years and it’s still number one. (Top10) Finally a category not dominated by corporations. Too bad it’s the last. | 9-11peace.org, The Nine Planets, Plan 9 OS |
Ah, but it goes deeper than that. I checked all of the single-letter alphanumeric .com domains using WHOIS, and all but three are reserved by IANA. Those three are q.com (owned by Qwest Communications), x.com (owned by PayPal), and z.com (owned by Nissan).
See, now I’ve read this blog entry and I’m just enough of a loser to wonder, “Who owns the domains?” That is, who owns http://www.1.com, http://www.2.com etc.
The answer, as you probably already knew, is “no one”. Of course while you already knew this, I had to actually go and try to load each one of those pages (I *am*, after all, a loser remember).