Matt Mullenweg, fellow Houstonian, recently switched his website to http://ma.tt/ (a domain name registered in Trinidad and Tobago). Join the club Matt! What club would that be? Why, people who have their names as domain names through a foreign country top-level domain of course.
I switched this blog to http://rake.sh/ about a year and a half ago, thanks to the country of St. Helena (they control the .sh domain name). But, I confess that I got the idea when I saw Pete Rojas’ personal website at http://roj.as. Anyways, I like my domain but it *is* a pain to spell it out to people because most people just don’t expect a domain name to end in anything but .com. The other thing I worry about is whether world politics could ever result in my domain name being taken away from me.
Here’s to hoping that the United States doesn’t declare war on St. Helena (or, for Matt’s sake, Trinidad and Tobago!) 
Inspired by your post, I went to see which strange foreign domain names I could register that would make for nice, short URLs. No such luck.
There is no .dd TLD (for to.dd). And while there is one for .er (Eritrea, for stadl.er), it’s “limited to businesses or persons actually in Eritrea”. (also, “Eritrea does not yet have a direct internet connection.”) Pooh.
Comment by tODD — January 24, 2008 @ 12:51 am
Not my name, nor a foreign domain, but it IS a pain trying to make people spell mo.notono.us. I blame del.icio.us for getting me on the idea in the first place…
Comment by Oskar Austegard — January 24, 2008 @ 2:06 pm
i tried getting jose.ph, but lost it halfway through the registration process, when it suddenly became “unavailable”
i do have another one, though: http://pl.usmin.us/zero/ for plus minus zero. quite a mouthful, eh? so i got myself an idn: ±0.com. try explaining to people that they have to use the numeric keypad with num-lock on, and press alt+0177 for the symbol. have finally settled on pmzo.com, where the o supposedly stands for online, or otherwise, or any word which fits the occasion.
Comment by joseph — February 28, 2008 @ 10:35 am