Russell Beattie

Every year about this time I start getting that itch to do something with the Mobitopia.com domain (and the various other TLDs like it that I own, except for mobitopia.org which is maintained by Erik). I like the name and have done various things with it over the years. It was the precursor domain to Mowser, for example, the home of a group blog, a forum, a delicious.com style list of mobile domains, and more. Currently it scrapes the latest Tweets from the original "Mobitopians".

What's always been the same though is that the domain name wasn't for whatever my "big idea" is at the moment, but instead something to play with. I still think of it that way. The problem is that even though I really like the name, it's very specific - having to do with mobiles - and very long. That said, the name, which I've had since 2003, still rings a bell with me and others. That, and because the domain is so old and been active, it's still got some decent Google Juice to it as well (it used to be 7 out of 10, but is now down to 5 like this blog).

So, what to do, what to do? A few ideas came to me recently -

* A database of "Web Widgets" that can be run on touch-screen Nokia phones like the 5800 and N97. There aren't a whole hell of a lot of them out there now, but hopefully that will change over time.

* Another list of mobile sites - I don't want to duplicate or take away from what Dennis is doing at Wap Review, but what I was thinking is that setting up an Amazon Mechanical Turk account and letting a bunch of people scour the web for mobile-oriented sites for pennies per URL would be a great way to gather up a pretty valuable database pretty quickly without a lot of work. From there it could be maintained by users.

* Something to do with the next generation of smartphone OSes: iPhone, Android, Symbian, Linux, Palm WebOS, Blackberry. I'm sick of pontificating though - the world doesn't need another smartphone blog. Something else that would be useful (and gainful) would be nice.

I'm not sure. Oh well,This is probably about as far as I'll go with it this year, but I figured I'd post about it since it was on my mind, and a bit more involved than a Tweet would require. What amazes me though, is even though I love the name - and there have been brief imitators out there like "mobilopia" - I've never gotten an offer for the domain! I mean, so random person paid me $2,000 last year for newfoo.com, but not for Mobitopia. That probably means it's not as great a name as I think it is, but like it.

It'd be nice to give the name something to stick to that was cool as well. Any ideas? Tweet me at @RussB with them!

-Russ