Wednesday, March 04, 2009

The wife and I are beginning to dig our way out of the busyness hole we've been in for the last few epochs. The fund-raising auction for my daughter's school has come and gone, and my company launched our website this week. Those were pretty massive events around here and we're burnt out despite the fact that there's still tons of work on our plates. One quick story about my company before I go wander off to numb my brain by staring blankly at the TV.

The company I work for is in the midst of redefining itself with new products to go along with some actual plans to make money. As part of that effort we decided that we needed a new name for our company since the old name was kind of limiting. So, we interviewed several organizations that specialize in corporate naming, hired one, and embarked upon a time-consuming and somewhat expensive exercise in re-naming, re-branding, and re-marketing (well, not so much "re" on the marketing front, since we probably never did any before). Of course we also made sure we that we owned the rights and the ".com" domain for our new name.

This week was the culmination of all that work as we launched our website and announced our new name. Everything went flawlessly.

But then, we heard from some random guy who couldn't get to our website. Then we heard from another...

Turns out, ha ha, that the previous company who owned our new ".com" name several years before we bought it, was a porn company, and that our url is blacklisted by most Internet porn filters and nanny software. In fact, we have a copy of one of these blacklists in our software and had I ever bothered to look, I would have seen our new company name blacklisted along with all the other pornographers.

That means that anyone who accesses the internet behind one of those filtering systems (many schools, public institutions, and corporations) can't currently get to our brand new spiffy website.

Jesus. That is the most ridiculous corporate goof I've seen in a while. Too bad it happened to nice guys like us.

Anyway, we're currently bogged down in multiple bureaucratic efforts to remove ourselves from the numerous lists that separate the porn from the not-porn on the net. Fun stuff.

6 comments:

Siôn said...

I guess bigandbouncy dot com wasn't the great masterstroke that you believed it was going to be.

Lola said...

I remember that Brown Bag software made some useful utility that I looked for at work once, and found more than I bargained for...

Mike said...

Siôn, our name wasn't that bad, but it was vaguely porn enough that we had joked about similar names that were obviously porny. Apparently we never took that thought to the next logical step.

Lola, that's what the porn companies do. I recall when whitehouse.com was a porn site, which was amusing since whitehouse.gov was the official site of the U.S. president.

Anonymous said...

I always wondered about whitehouse.com ; here Al Gore invented the interwebz but couldn't control even that? Even Madonna got 'her' site back.

I'm suprised that I haven't had those problems with my cookiepants site. But I've had it forever so I guess no one else grabbed it before me.

It's like Japanese comics. Em and I like to play "Porn or for kids?" when I'm buying japanese craft books in Japantown or in Little Tokyo -- because it's hard to tell when you can't read the text.

Of course now I'm dying to know what your site is!!!

Avery Gray said...

People use the internet for something other than porn? That doesn't sound right.

Mike said...

Meg, porn or for kids! That's a great game, not unlike Ass or Elbow which I have unproudly played online.

Avery, it's true! There's something for everyone on the Internet, even for non-porn-lovin' freaks.