Hear me out now. Sure, one of the most obvious mistakes a domain noob can make is registering domains that include trademarks. And certainly Flickr has a trademark. So what am I doing these years later registering a trademark domain? Learning another lesson?  The hard way? Perhaps, so let me state this up front. If you’re the domain police from Yahoo… I can explain everything. First of all, you’re welcome to the domain. Just show me your badge and I’ll hand it over.  But, here’s what I was thinking.

I want to, but can’t, put an advanced search into Flickr, find Creative Commons images around a keyword, and get an RSS feed of the results. Kind of obvious, but you can’t do it.  I’ve fooled around with Yahoo Pipes but I don’t have the coding chops to make it happen. I registered the domain and put this post up to try to attract a developer for the project. For the right guy this is probably a few hours work.

But too: Flickr champions homemade apps by users. Check out the App Garden.  A lot of the apps have the word flickr in them. Some of those even charge. I have to assume that Yahoo has a pretty lax attitude towards the Flickr mark.

Typosquatting, at least the way I think of it, is where domainers register typos of known marks for the purpose of profiting from error traffic (kind of like Verizon and OpenDns). An 8 for an i, a 5 for an r and suddenly you’re on a page of ads.  This is what typosquatting / cybersquatting domains look like. But wait a second… isn’t Flickr derivative of Flicker? Weird. Check out the numbers the Flicker.com guy has posted there – 3.6 Million visits a year! No ads. Hmm. With all that traffic spilling over from Flickr you’d think he’d have some ads there. But checking “flicker” in a Google search I see all the results are related to Flickr. No ads at all! Could it be that Yahoo would come after him if he did have ads there? Checking the Whois, I’m seeing that Flicker.com was registered in 1998, flickr.com in 2003. Complicated. It does get complicated. [Update: 20100614 Looks like Flickr parent owner Yahoo bought Flicker.com.]

Anyway, if you’re a developer and you can build Flickrss I’ve got the domain ready to go. Drop me a line.

Running wordpress there’s been so many times I wished I could have taken a picture over to a site and come away with a fully formatted WordPress header, its code, and where to put it. (Headermaker.com is not that, right now anyway). A good example of a site that does something like that is LogoMaker.com, very cool (and category-killer domain name). FooterMaker.com wants to be a drag-and-drop  interface for building a great footer for your site. My chops are so minimal though, I don’t really know how much work it would take to build. This could make a great portal to a Fremium model web design company. Especially if your portfolio included footers/design that looked like this!
Looking for a developer, ideas and feedback on this idea.
BTW I built this diagram at Gliffy.com Cool site. 30 day free trial. The jpg embedded in the diagram was found through Sprixi.com. Great sites, wish I could remember the domain long enough to tell my friends.

As a domainer, scanning a list of available keyword domains, haven’t you wanted to plug the lot of them into a bulk search tool that would return the number of search results Google finds for each–to get a feel for the volume of attention the phrase is generating. For example, 296,000,000 for number of searches, and 55,200,000 for “number of searches”. I’ve looked around and asked around on the boards but I’ve not been able to find a tool that does that in bulk. If you know of one please contact me. If you, as a domainer, think this would be a useful tool and would consider chipping in on the cost of development, please contact me. And,  if  you’re a developer who could build a Number of Searches tool please feel free to contact me with a quote.