What do you think about Top Level Domains? We're all familiar with some of the originals: .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, .mil, etc. Now there are all kinds of new ones: .tv, .name, .biz, .info, .mobi, etc. The Internet evolved from several different networks. For example, universities had their own for data sharing (now .edu); the military had their own (now .mil); and on and on. Nowadays, though, what value does the TLD really add to a website's name? The branding is in the second level domain name. TuscanyCircle.net, TuscanyCircle.com, and TuscanyCircle.org all point to TuscanyCircle (duh), and the TLD really doesn't add much value. Comcast.com points to Comcast's overall business, while comcast.net is used for their ISP portion; this distinction can easily be lost on those trying to email someone with a comcast address. And what if I wanted to snag comcast.biz? Pragmatically, how are comcast.com and comcast.biz different? The first connotes a commercial enterprise and the second a business. Whoa. Big difference. </sarcasm>

I can see government and military networks being separate or separable; but I don't see any point to having multiple TLDs for the private sector. Take the .mobi TLD as an example. It's supposed to stand for "mobile". (I think several other alternatives would have been better than "mobi", but that's merely an aesthetic judgment.) There are several ways of detecting mobile browsers, though, so a separate domain just isn't necessary. TuscanyCircle detects mobile browsers, by the way; when detected, it changes the search block to one that works on mobile devices (the standard one is a tad too sophisticated for PIE). Google has done this for a while. I can use all kinds of Google tools on my WM5 PDA without remembering mobile-specific URLs. Google detects the mobile browser and presents different pages, better suited for mobile browsing. No new TLD is necessary, or frankly, even desired. Some domain names are even hard to remember without adding a bunch of TLDs to sift through.

Something like TuscanyCircle does not seem to have an obviously implied TLD. I originally picked .net because it was my presence on the Internet and didn't fit any other TLDs at the time (last millennium). I've since added .com and .org, largely because it's not obvious which would apply and because these three tend to be the most common, popularly speaking. (I would add .edu as a way of thumbing my nose at the "academic" establishment--the joke that it largely is--but it's been locked down in an elitist attempt to protect their fragile egos--er, pseudo-intellectual home-away-from-reality--no, I mean industry, yeah, bilking industry.)

Educate me. Enlighten me. Show me the value of TLDs that I may be missing. What do you think about them?