Master of my Domain

“Are you Master of your Domain?”
“I am King of the County. You?”
“Lord of the Manor.”
“I’m Queen of the castle!”
– Jerry, George and Elaine, in “The Contest“, Seinfeld, aired 11/18/92

I didn’t know her. Her name was Kathleen Creighton, but she went by ‘Casey’, presumably a reference to her initials. Kathleen was well known on one of the earliest online communities, The Well (her WELL username was ‘casey’). She was the BBS/online service reviewer for the San Francisco Bay Area computer newspaper MicroTimes, and a contributor to WIRED magazine’s Street Cred section. And, she was a tech savvy online pioneer who staked a digital claim on the domain name ‘casey.com’ when she registered it in August of 1994. It was a time when the word, domain, would for many first bring to mind an episode of Seinfeld which added ‘master of my domain’ into our modern lexicon. But speak of an internet ‘domain name’, and you’d likely draw a blank stare.

That’s what writer Joshua Quittner found and reported in his October ‘94 WIRED magazine article “Billions Registered”, in which he described the surprising number of Fortune 500 companies who had not registered their domain names, many of which had no idea what a domain name was or why they would want one. To demonstrate his point, Quittner registered the domain ‘mcdonalds.com’ in the process of educating the McDonalds Corporation what it was and why they should care. He ended that article inviting readers to email him at ronald@mcdonalds.com to offer suggestions on what he should do with the domain. He eventually relinquished it to McDonalds in return for a $3,500 donation to a Brooklyn school for computers and internet access. McDonalds was lucky.

Sadly, Kathleen Creighton passed away just a few months after she registered ‘casey.com’, before she ever had an opportunity to make any use of it. There was no web site, no email addresses, just a WHOIS registration record with a contact name and email address to whom my inquires went unanswered. When I next sent my inquiry to the technical contact on the registration record, they informed me of Kathleen’s recent demise, and transferred the domain to me. I had just happened to be the next ‘Casey’ who was interested in staking the same digital claim that Kathleen had, and the domain became mine. Was I lucky? If so, it’s always come with the sad reminder that it came from somebody’s passing.

The oldest capture of casey.com by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is from December 27, 1996. And it’s a picture of the landing page of the Internet provider I used at the time (Capital Area Internet Service). The next capture is almost two years later, on December 2, 1998, shows a full website, and it’s awesome! A photoshop filter accident as the main image, image mapped navigation (WITH alternate text links), an animated GIF fake traffic counter, and YES, that’s some Comic Sans! So when did casey.com launch on the World Wide Web? The clue is there under the the ‘last updated’ link in the upper left corner. Casey.com launched on January 24, 1998.

In the 20 years since, casey.com has evolved from a personal website, to a company site (during my self-employment phase when casey.com even sponsored my kids soccer teams), to a blog, and then to a neglected blog. Somewhere along the way social media diminished my necessity of having a personal website. Homesteading online has gotten simpler, and generic online tract housing now swamps the now old little houses on the digital prairie.

Even better than a URL, has been having an @casey.com email address. My ‘Contacts’ application reveals how friends emails have changed over the years; @aol, @erols, @earthlink, @hotmail, @verizon, @gmail and so on as providers and their offerings come and go. It doesn’t suck having an email address that’s yours forever. One that rolls as easily as your name, because it’s your name. Sorry to all the other Chris Casey’s out there, but I’m chris@casey.com and have been for more than 20 years. More recently it was a thrill to give my new daughter-in-law her own casey.com email address.

A couple times each month, I receive inquiries not unlike my outreach to Kathleen Creighton those many years ago, asking if I’d be willing to sell casey.com. The short answer is “No, casey.com is not for sale”. A longer more honest answer is, “Everything has a price. If your offer means a life of wealth and leisure, I’m listening.”  Who knows? Plenty of domain names have sold for that much and more (though they tend to be nouns, not names). But that’s just a nice daydream. Deep down my real domain dream is that casey.com, my little slice of digital real estate, remains in my family for their use for many years to come.

In the updated (2000) version of his book, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold (Master of his domain at rheingold.com) wrote about the passing of his friend and collaborator on The Well, Kathleen Creighton, aka ‘Casey’.

“The day the news of Casey’s death was announced, people started testifying online. Dozens of people revealed that their first welcoming email came from Casey, and that she had provided free, unpublicized technical support as they learned their way around the WELL. At her funeral, her family was surprised to find Casey’s family and face-to-face friends outnumbered by a factor of ten by all these people she had known “through the Internet”.

My day will come too. But there are all kinds of Caseys; first name Caseys, last name Caseys, nickname Caseys, businesses named Casey… and whether it’s my own family or someone else who becomes its new master, casey.com will carry on after me. Until that time, with gratitude to Kathleen, to Casey, my turn as Lord of the Virtual Manor that is casey.com continues.