

.museum domains held in the US - larrys
http://index.museum/land.php?country=US&lang=uk

======
LeafStorm
I noticed
[http://northcarolina.history.museum/](http://northcarolina.history.museum/)
in the listing. I clicked it, and it resolves to an IP that is no longer
routable. [http://asheville.art.museum/](http://asheville.art.museum/)
suffered a similar fate, and
[http://ncmls.durham.museum/](http://ncmls.durham.museum/) immediately
redirected to [http://lifeandscience.org/](http://lifeandscience.org/).

I imagine a lot of these were purchased as "Hey! There's a .museum top-level
domain! Let's buy it! ...You know, we should probably write this down
somewhere."

~~~
mistermumble
This is similar to .travel top-level domain. Someone thought it was a good
idea, just like .museum.

Since 2006, the travel.travel registry has sold 200,000 .travel domains. I am
a heavy user of travel sites (Expedia, Hipmunk, hotel sites, etc). I have
never, in the course of my online usage, ever run into a .travel site.

This is why gTLDs are likely to fail. At least for users and for purchasers of
subdomains, not necessarily for the registrars.

EDIT: added Wikipedia link
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.travel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.travel)

~~~
markdown
The national tourism bureau where I live recently switched to
[http://www.fiji.travel/](http://www.fiji.travel/)

Strangely enough, they kept the www

------
kylec
I never got why .museum was created, it's way too long and obscure to be
effective for domain names. Even shortening it to .mus or something would be a
big improvement, but it seems like a lot of museums are using the more
commonly known .org or .edu anyways.

~~~
rogerhoward
As others pointed out, this was a different era - more the Yahoo era than
Google's, when organizing the Web still seemed (to some) an attainable goal. I
worked for the guy behind this at the time, though not on this project, and it
seemed very odd to me even then... this is not only a product of its time, but
very much a product of the unique and quirky museum technology culture.

Shorter names weren't seen as necessarily good - at least within some of the
conversations around this TLD's inception there was some scorn for the overly
techie, terse TLDs and domain names.

~~~
magic_haze
I wasn't aware the museum technology culture was even a thing. It definitely
seems... quirky, though: just look at the list of domains for the JFK museum:

    
    
        thesixthfloor.jfk.museum
        dallas.jfk.museum
        dealey.plaza.museum
        dealeyplaza.kennedy.assassination.museum
        dealey.plaza.assassination.museum
        dealey.plaza.jfk.museum

~~~
im3w1l
Seems pretty similar to the usenet naming.

[http://usenetstats.com/top100reads.php](http://usenetstats.com/top100reads.php)
(NSFW). Please also note the non-binary channels.

------
Mankhool
This is the longest one. national.healthandmedicine.washingtondc.museum It
redirects to a real estate site in Spokane.

------
donretag
The 'lang' param at the end of the url is interesting. The English content is
'uk' not 'en' or 'us'. The values seem to be country codes.

Changing the param to a different country only changes the name of the
country, nothing else:

country=US&lang=es ==> .museum names held in Estados Unidos:

country=DK&lang=it ==> .museum names held in Danimarca:

------
SeanLuke
Given that it already has a completely unique domain name (si.edu),
smithsonian.museum seems overkill.

~~~
petercooper
From a technical POV. But from a human POV, having 'smithsonian.museum' on
their signage or advertising could be a win (assuming it's obvious it's a Web
address).

~~~
dave5104
Something like this has always worried me with ICANN's idea of opening up
TLDs. It feels like a decade ago, most advertisements contained the "www."
prefix to signify a web address. Nowadays, you rarely see them, since most
people know what to do with a .com, .org, etc.

Once the TLDs open up, will we need to go back to using a "www." to signify
this is a domain?

~~~
cardamomo
I've been curious about this too. I never know quite how to communicate that
something is a web address if my audience is both technical and non-technical
folks.

I wonder, though, if a better solution than going back to prepending www would
be to prepend // instead. Shorter than [http://](http://) (or
[https://](https://) as the case may be), but doesn't assume that www is a
valid subdomain.

~~~
csense
> prepend //

Then the technical people think it's a comment, not a web address. Maybe ://
would be better? Wait, that looks like some weird emoticon...

I like [http://](http://) because it's precise. EDIT: Wow, HN highlights that
as a link. It goes to about:blank (on my browser at least).

~~~
286c8cb04bda
_> Then the technical people think it's a comment, not a web address._

They would be wrong. URLs beginning with // are scheme-relative --
[http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-url-20120524/#resolve-a-
string-...](http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-url-20120524/#resolve-a-string-as-a-
scheme-relative-url)

~~~
dragonwriter
Which actually makes it a _worse_ substitute for [http://](http://) for a
combined technical/non-technical audience that something merely _potentially_
confusable with a comment by a technical audience.

