A .reviews Top Level Domain for Your Book Blog: Yay or Nay?

This is part of a new “Blog Tech” series I aim to start in which I will be talking about techy stuff for your (wordpress) blog. Got any topics you want covered? Email me tweet me @FictionThirst or mail me mail@thirstforfiction.com

Since 20^th June 2011, events have been in motion that will change the internet FOREVER. On that fateful summer day, under a cloudless blue sky (maybe), the group responsible for the .coms and .orgs and .co.uks and .nets of this world decided something important: that the World Wide Web would be flooded with hundreds – no thousands – of new “generic Top Level Domains” (gTLDs).

The technical stuff

Okay – so the poet in me might be exaggerating a little bit. What essentially happened is that the ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, decided that the web was getting to big for just 22 of the previously held gTLDs – extensions we’re all familiar with such as .com, .co.uk, .org .net et cetera et cetera. What they proposed – indeed had passed – was the idea that the web should be opened to all sorts of dots, and that companies and corporations should assist in choosing some of these dots. Among the proposed were extensions such as .flights .cooking .tools .photo and .REVIEWS – which is going live on the 4^th June. THIS MONTH.

.reviews extensions go live on (Wednesday) the 4th June

Yes, you saw that correctly. Instead of being stuck with .com and .co.uk, we merry band of book bloggers will now also be able to choose from a .reviews domain. The question is: be this good or bad?

There’s no questioning that having a .reviews domain is kinda cool. I mean, getting over the fact that you’d be in possession of a brand new piece of the internet, .reviews will probably help your site visitors understand what you’re doing: reviewing books (hopefully!).

On the flipside: it could cost you

The problem: it could be costly. The prices of the new gTLDs varies from extension to extension; some, such as .luxury is in the hundreds of pounds. Others are the same price as any other standard domain; about £6 ($10) a year. Others yet are slightly more expensive, but still “only” £30ish ($50). Personally, I suspect .reviews will be roughly the cost of a .com extension; it’s not got any particularly expensive “value” attached to it like .luxury, and it’s a pretty simple one. Still; we have yet to find out.

With that in mind, will you be getting a .reviews extension for your domain? Personally (and depending on the cost) – I’m kinda excited and I probably will, if only for the novelty! Whether or not that means using it as a simply redirect to my thirstforfiction.com domain, or the opposite – redirecting my .com to my .reviews – I have yet to decide.

Enough of me waffling. What do you guys think? Will you be buying a .reviews extension for your book blog? Why (not)?