Monthly Archives: January 2011

AOL Hijacks WoW.com Domain From WoW Insider

WoW Insider is perhaps the largest World of WarCraft blog online. As part of the Weblogs Inc. network, it has similar traffic numbers and weekly post counts to Engadget, TUAW and Joystiq. It also shares the misfortune of being owned by AOL.

In their latest dubious management move, AOL corporate commandeered WoW Insider’s first-rate domain name — WoW.com — and used it to launch a Groupon clone.

WoW Insider now resides at wow.joystiq.com.

If you’ll pardon the pun, wow. I can hardly believe that anyone would think that a good move. It will hurt WoW Insider — in terms of possible search engine penalties, dead links, and confused users wondering why the domain stopped working with little or no warning — and there will be little advantage.

Someone at AOL obviously heard about the strange success of Groupon, and figured it would be easy to emulate it. Frankly, I’m surprised Groupon managed to do as well as they have been, monetarily. I highly doubt that, despite the simplicity of the service in itself, AOL will be able to replicate it. And it’s really dumb to re-purpose a domain like that. It reeks of bait-and-switch, like their plan to market the new Wow.com service is to trick a bunch of World of WarCraft fans into accidentally visiting it.

The Queue: Why did WoW Insider switch domains, again? [WoW Insider]

BlogBuzz January 29, 2011

New Bookmarklet for Twitter for Mac

Back when I first started using Tweetie for Mac, I put together a modified version of the default bookmarklet available on the developer’s website. With a single click I could send the URL and page title of the current page in my web browser…

Cache Data with the WordPress Transients API

WP Engineer had an interesting post recently about a WordPress “Transients API” that is used for caching bits of data temporarily. I often use the Options API to cache things from external servers, such as Twitter statuses, so I don’t hit Twitter’s servers more…

BlogBuzz January 22, 2011

HTML5 Gets a Logo

The W3C has put up a microsite with the new logo for HTML5. It looks pretty good, certainly better than its predecessors, even if it does have a bit of the “Web 2.0″ look that is finally starting to lose its novelty. I like…

HTML5 Boilerplate

HTML5 Boilerplate is a default template that you can use as a starting point to build HTML5-ready web designs around. It has a few neat features, like: Full cross-browser compatibility…even with IE6. It uses some scripts to add support to those uncool browsers. You…

The BuySellAds Browser Extension

BuySellAds has just released a new extension for Google Chrome (with a Firefox version on the way) that is aimed at advertisers. It displays a BuySellAds icon in your toolbar, which lights up red when a website you visit has BuySellAds zones available. Clicking…

BlogBuzz January 15, 2011

Lord of the Rings Online Revenue Triples

I’ve long been a fan of the “freemium” business model, especially when it comes to online games. I’ve enjoyed playing Dungeons & Dragons Online partially for this reason, and was excited to hear that switching to their freemium approach increased their revenue by 500%.…