Parked domains – A personal laundry list of unrealized ambitions

A post over on Dumb Little Man – Tips for Life entitled “10 Sure-Fire Ways to Be a Complete Failure at Everything” made me laugh when I hit number 2:

Start 17 Projects, Finish None: If you want to be a failure, get great at starting things. An idea hits (“I’ll start a blog about making money on the internet?”) You jump straight into it. Two days later, you’re bored. Another idea hits (“I’ll take up martial arts and become a black-belt!”) You get lessons. A week later, another idea hits (“I could play guitar in a rock band!”) You buy all the equipment. … Are you seeing a pattern? One great way to fail to ever meet your goal is to keep starting on new ones.

The ever-growing testament to my as-yet-unrealized ambitions (a bit of optimism can’t hurt) is the list of domain names I’ve registered over the years, parked in my GoDaddy account. It seems every time I brainstorm up a new idea, I sprint off to go register the domain “just in case.”

I have the names of all my kids registered, just parked for the future. A couple gaming related domains, for a couple ideas (which I still think are good) that just need some time, love, and a tad bit of PHP mastery. Several marketing-related domains, mostly without planned use but they seemed kind of cool and worth grabbing. One I thought of using as home for a kind of StumbleUpon-ish blog focused on Wikipedia. Another related to parenting, which I’m actually working on now in my unplanned career downtime. Even one which could be the home of a cool and simple Tweet app.

I own “wanderingmallard.com” because, well, I have a thing for ducks thanks to my alma mater, and the name sounded lyrical. socialmallard.com is unused, but is in fact the name of my registered LLC to be used for consulting. (I even once registered “huckthefuskies.net” in a dig to Oregon’s arch rivals…why not?)

And so it goes. I won’t even mention what the annual domain renewal fees are.

Am I the only one with a mini-domain hoarding obsession?