Who's Who at What URL

Web browsing seems like one of those things that should be logical. So where would you expect URLs like www.skindivermagazine.com and www.skindiver.net to take you? Odds are your first guess will be wrong: Rodale’s Scuba Diving magazine has registered these URLs, and they’ll take you directly to Rodale’s site at http://www.scubadiving.com. In the web game it’s not uncommon to purchase additional URLs that will take readers to your site, but buying and using URLs that people would expect to take them to the competition is another story.

The owner of http://www.skindiver.com isn’t Skin Diver Magazine but Great Destinations, a dive travel agent. If you’re looking for Skin Diver’s site, the address is http://www.skin-diver.com. Skin Diver is a late comer to the online world, and part of the price for coming late is finding that some of the best diving URLs have already been snapped up.

Not that there aren’t still opportunities out there. It looks like the addresses http://www.scubadivingmagazine.com and .net are still available. Anyone want to grab those?

— W. D.