How I Ended Up With Aught.com

Back in 1996 I was a young and eager media aspirant, only a couple of years into Silicon Alley and all of its promise. Somehow, I found myself with the title “executive producer” for SPINonline, where I was charged with developing their website (and leading the then-relevant music magazine into the digital age). Alas, a sexual harassment case against then-owner (pornographer’s son) Bob Guccione, Jr. led to an eventual sale of the magazine – and more importantly for me – a dearth of money to develop their website. This gave me a lot of time to surf a brand new web, and think futuristic (and perhaps pot-fueled) thoughts.

I remember it was early 1996 and someone was talking about the best bands of the nineties – a common conversation at SPIN magazine – which got me thinking of decades. This lead to the wonder of the next decade’s brand — I thought to myself “if this is the nineties, what will next decade be called?” At the time, I had I no idea what the next decade should be called – the zeros maybe? I did recall an episode of The Simpsons where Grandpa Simpson was going on about life in Springfield in aught-five when he wore an onion dangling from his belt (which was the style of the time.) Aha! Aught! That’s the name of the next decade!

I was delusional enough to think that I was the only person having this thought, and because I was working in the digital “space,” I went to networksolutions.com and saw that aught.com was available, Thinking that this was going to be the catch phrase of skateboard of the next millenium (“dude, that ollie was totally aught!”) I registered aught.com, fully expecting to eventually sell it for maybe $50,000 (which was the style of the time.)

Guess what? I never sold it. But its still my private email domain (and now serves as the private email domain for my wife and boys!). For most people it’s not that big a deal to have the same email address for 15 years. But the ups and downs of a career as a freelance television producer, writer and interactive consultant has made me appreciate the consistency of my own domain: aught.com. (I’m choosing not to be depressed by that last sentence.)

That being said, wanna buy a domain?

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