P.S. You can use these for marketing your startup, guys.

Putting linkbait on its own dedicated ___domain makes it easier to spread, as you can give it a Zenlike purity of purpose. (I've used several of these -- like whattimeisit.com or whatismyip.com -- for years but the first one I ever said would go viral in a day was isbarackobamamuslim.com . Taps passion and has a built-in value proposition for anyone putting a link to it anywhere.)

Really, a ___domain name costs $10 these days and you can have a Wordpress blog up, themed, and filled with content in under an hour. If you have a good idea, that good idea probably rates buying a ___domain name for it. There are SEO-related reasons why I'd keep most of my good ideas on my main ___domain(s), but there are at least a few "pillar pieces" I'm strongly considering domainifying. Plus you can always built them out later if you own the ___domain.

I dipped my toes in the water for my business this year. Truth be known: hasn't been that successful as of today, but I learned from the experience. See write-up @ blog: http://kalzumeus.com/2008/12/13/learning-from-a-specific-exa...

http://isbarackobamamuslim.com was not for marketing purposes and didn't really go "viral" (http://s3.amazonaws.com/altano/droplet/isbarackobamamuslim.p...).

Led me to http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/

Funniest single serving site ever.

You need to try it out, for example:

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=something

LOL, that's awesome! A few years ago I had a similar idea and registered googlefor.info, but like so many of my "site ideas", time got the best of it.

Now I just need to remember to letmegooglethatforyou.com'ify every question someone asks me before I tell them "just Google it!".

That's even better than justfuckinggoogleit.com, which has been around for years. I wish they'd take you to a standard results page, though.

That would break their business model.

Ah, I didn't stick around long enough to notice they had one. Such bad taste :)

There's a simple easter egg in the HTML source.

Very cool. One interesting detail is that the phenomenon spikes right around the time it's named. I hadn't heard the name before (and don't actually like it). But it makes sense that the successful introduction of a name would coincide with exponential growth in the thing being named.

I looked through the author's list to see whether it includes the immortal zombo.com (it does), and scanned through it for other really old instances. There are a few from the 90s, the best of which is the oldest (1996) - perdu.com, which made me laugh. It's in French, though. (I started typing out a translation but it felt like spoiling the joke.)

One of the most interesting and thoughtful papers I've read.