Conceptualist.com, By Sahar Sarid

A lot of the really interesting services out there are about discovery, rather than search. Since they're both ways of finding content, it's worth looking at what makes them different.

Search is goal-oriented, discovery is about the journey. It's the difference between going to the hardware store to get a Phillips screwdriver, and browsing the travel section in a book store. Rather than having very specific criteria in mind for what you want, you're using indirect clues to help you find something that will meet your general needs. For a travel book that might include whether you've seen it mentioned in a review, if you've enjoyed the author's work before, if it has an attractive cover, if there's praise from people you trust, if your hairdresser mentioned the location, if you'd seen a documentary on the area, or if it happened to be sticking out from the shelf a little more than the others.

Search is solitary, discovery is social. Most of the factors behind buying a travel book are about interactions you've had with other people. Digg is one example of trying to emulate some of those traditional mechanisms for finding popular items. Facebook's addictiveness is all about being tapped into the pulse of your social circle, not with a particular goal in mind, but just to keep up with the context and doing the equivalent of picking fleas off each other's backs (now that's a Facebook App idea!). The power of me.dium comes from the injection of social context into browsing. It restores the cues we're used to in the physical world, so we can judge locations by seeing where both our friends and strangers hang out.

Tasting takes advantage of a five-day "add grace period" that is a current feature of domain name registration. This grace period allows the purchaser of a domain name registration to return the name to the pool of available names within five days of registration, with a full refund of both the registration fee charged by the registrar and the ICANN fee (20 cents) that it receives for each registration. (Some tasters reduce their exposure further and operate as domain name registrars.)

A domain taster will monitor the traffic that its newly purchased domain names attract during the add grace period, and will keep the domains that are likely to generate revenue while releasing the ones that are not. There is very little risk to the domain taster, since it will receive a refund of all of its registration and ICANN fees paid for any unprofitable domain that it chooses to release.

Lest you think domain tasting is small potatoes, consider the sheer numbers of domains affected by this practice: ICANN reported that in January 2007, the top 10 domain tasters accounted for more than 45 million deleted .com and .net domain names, about 95 percent of all deleted domain names in those two domains.

Bob Parsons, the CEO of GoDaddy.com, a domain name registrar, noted that of 764,672 domain names registered in one day on March 31, 2006, about 92 percent of them, or 703,503, were dropped just before the grace period expired.

The high level of activity explains why a client that fails to renew its domain name registration within whatever renewal grace period is offered by its registrar is likely to lose control of the name. If the client domain attracts even a small amount of traffic, and that traffic brings revenue to the site that the taster builds for that domain name (through the use of "click-through" ads, for example), the domain name will be retained by the taster and added to its stable of money-making domains.