my name dot com

Last week i registered the domain seanmacentee.com. I’d had my eye on it for years… back in 2007, i sent an email to the then owner asking them if they’d be willing to sell it. No reply. I emailed them the following year and received the same silent treatment. After that i think i just gave up. I’m not sure exactly when it became available but leateds happened to see it was available last week and told me about it. I bought it on the spot.

Priceless

Owning your own name as a dot com is rare. It’s rare because names are common… they’re passed on through generations and over time the chances are there is/was someone more tech savvy, more famous, more greedy than you are and they’ll own yourname.com. There’s nothing you can do about it only try to buy the owner out or hope they forget to renew the domain. I got lucky but after so many years, i can finally direct people to seanmacentee.com. Unlike the previous owner, i’ll actually do something with it.

Plans for seanmacentee.com

What i plan on doing is scrapping smemon.com and rebranding it as seanmacentee.com. It just makes more sense for a whole bunch of reasons… firstly, smemon.com was only originally registered because i couldn’t get seanmacentee.com. It was in fact 3rd choice as I’d also wanted macentee.com. 6 years on since i first sent this site live and i’ll finally get the name i wanted to start with. For practical reasons, it’s also a little easier to direct people to seanmacentee.com than it is to smemon.com. It doesn’t need an explanation and i won’t have to spell it out letter by letter. From a personal branding perspective, it looks better. Lastly, it’s a good excuse to change things up a bit.

I’ve been pretty quiet here in 2012. Not every day requires 500 words of text, but there’s no reason why i can’t upload photos or share snippets of useful information on a regular basis… that’s getting in to tumblr / microblogging territory. I’ll more than likely revamp the site and build the new one with that in mind.

Changing the world one photo at a time…

Over the past few months in particular, my flickr photos are being used increasingly around the web. My flickr account tells me i’m averaging about 2,000 views per day. My photos have appeared on Forbes, Techcrunch, Mashable, Lifehacker, The Guardian, Wired, CBS News amongst many others. I could continue to namedrop for fun, but i won’t. I’ll just tell you that over the past week i’ve also been told some of my photos will be used in a magazine and even a small independent movie. The thing is, a lot of the photos that are being used are nothing special. In fact had i known they’d appear on those kind of sites i would have made a bit more effort with them… although i generally just upload photos without any editing whatsoever, on occasion i will go to the trouble of photo-shopping some if i think they’re worth it. I’ll probably share more of those type of photos on the new site.

This is the beauty of open source / creative commons though… i’m not a pro photographer, i just take lots of photos and enjoy it. My own belief is that the vast majority of photos on the web shouldn’t be copyright by default. They should be  creative commons licenced by default… much like the default status on a Facebook update is ‘post to everyone’ or ‘public’.

I feel it’s your right to look at a photo and use it as you please provided you credit me. As a content creator, that’s what i want to be able to do when i look at stuff… take it and improve upon it or use it to illustrate something else. I want to browse google images, take the best photo i come across and photoshop it or use it in an article with few restrictions. That’s the way things *should* work. It’s the way i want them to work, so i try to do my bit… my flickr collection now contains over 7,400 photos… every single one of them has a cc licence and it’ll stay that way.