SEMANTICS
words and phrases in language, or the meaning or relationship of meanings of a sign or set of signs; especially: connotative meaning”.
A
Approach ten people on the street and ask them what the internet domain name .bike is about, and even if they haven’t heard of new domain names the chances are very good that they’ll say “it’s about bikes”.
Te same goes for .camera, .email or .repair, and the vast majority of the 355 new domains that are live at the time of writing (with more to come in the approaching months). All these new domains are meaningful because they refer to something specific that consumers innately understand.
If you ask those same ten people what .com means, you’ll probably get ten confused looks, because it doesn’t mean anything to them. In the Web 1.0 technology era, .com meant different things to different people. A small handful of insiders may have known that .com was short for “commercial”, but for most people the word they were looking at just meant it was an internet address.
Te killer trait of the new generic top-level
domain (gTLD) programme isn’t numbers or size—it’s specificity.
Making the connection
Affinities exist all around us, and they are very powerful. Businesses have affinity with their industry partners, their geography and their community of customers, among other things. Individuals have affinity to a hobby, a church, an occupation, the business of an employer, or a sport.
Online providers of photographic services have a strong affinity with .photography because it tells the internet what they do. It shares their affinity with their customers.
When you visit
www.jamesforbes.photography— one of the sites on Donuts’ increasingly crowded ‘featured sites’ page—you have a pretty good idea about what you’re getting. And if you have an affinity for photography you might be more inclined to click on, or remember, a URL that
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www.trademarksandbrandsonline.com
ccording to dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, the term ‘semantics’ means “the study of the meanings of
TO AFFINITY AND BEYOND
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