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Putting the Times’s First Email Address to Bed
- walshemj 10y agoQuite sweet in way that in 94/95 the NYT had not a clue about mail when some businesses had been running it for well over a decade by that point.
- cm2187 10y agoJournalism is the art of explaining to others what you haven't really understood yourself...
- rhizome 10y agoAnother way of saying that is that journalists are people who have questions.
- sah2ed 10y agoI wouldn't say they had no clue about email. The NYT did in fact publish an article about email in 1990 [0]. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/13/us/some-computer-conversation-is-changing-human-contact.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/13/us/some-computer-conversat...
- passivepinetree 10y agoI've always wondered why the Times' domain was nytimes.com rather than nyt.com or newyorktimes.com. nytimes.com seems like an odd mix of initials and spelling the words out. This was a fascinating look into early internet history. Also, it was pretty cool of Markoff to give the domain up in exchange for keeping his old email address, rather than holding the paper hostage for a bunch of money.
- hackuser 10y agoWhy not switch to a .nyt TLD? Or .times?
- ceejayoz 10y agoBecause it costs $185k, involves a bunch of work and infrastructure, and wouldn't really benefit them?
- Preemo 10y agoThis. Also, most people just plainly do not understand the new TLDs yet; and sadly I don't think they will ever become mainstream anytime soon. Deviate from .com .net .ca .org and most people become clueless. Especially when users are sending an email, try explaining name@newyork.times is simply the address when a user insists there's a typo and it's missing .com or equivalent. Unfortunately adding a www. before, say on a business card, to denote it's a web address is counter-intuitive in most cases as that just lengthens the domain when typically the reason why one would get/migrate to a new TLD is to shorten it/make it easy to remember.
- zippergz 10y agoMade worse by the fact that non-technical people DO make such errors with some frequency. I don't know how many times I've seen someone's email address as "www.joe@example.com" or "joe@example," even on printed material that you'd hope people would carefully proof-read.
- JimmyAustin 10y agoMy personal email is me at james aust.in, and its constantly a pain to read to people, especially over the phone. I started saying it as me at "me at james austin with a dot before the in", but eventually settled on "me at james aust dot in". Only way to get it on the first try.
- wyldfire 10y agoIMO the latter sounds clearer to me. I think I'm pretty savvy but if I listened to the former on the phone I would have to take a second to parse it and then I would read back something like the latter to you to confirm I got it right.
- CPLX 10y agoIn case you were wondering too, if you go to the browser bar and type in nyt.com right now you are, in fact, redirected to the nytimes.com website. How about that.
- comex 10y agoIn the article's comments section, a notable comment from the Peter Lewis mentioned in the article: John, let the record show that The Times also initially turned down my free offer of the nytimes.com domain, which I had registered. A couple of years later they decided this internet thing was perhaps more than a fad, and demanded that I transfer ownership, which I willingly did. They still haven't reimbursed me for the registration fee :-)
- elastic_church 10y agoshouldn't have transferred ownership. if they weren't treating the internet seriously, then their trademark likely didn't include a provision for it either
- dlandis 10y agoArticles like this make me miss the old nyt. It was so comforting to have a publication you could trust, a paper of record. Those days are long gone. Nowadays, the constant, desperate obsession with controlling and manipulating the narrative is just so icky.