Here's something you don’t see everyday

It looks like one of the best college newspapers in the country forgot to renew its internet domain name. Hence, at this very moment, the Cavalier Daily is no longer available over the internets. This applies to all URLs hosted on the web page including old articles.

I am guessing that when the Cavalier Daily first appeared online, which was approximately ten years ago, it must have signed a ten year contract with its provider and the ten years have expired. A similar thing happened to the Washington Post in 2004 when it failed to renew the washpost.com domain it uses for its corporate email.

This is not only an example of something that internet businesses have to protect against but also of an opportunity for opportunistic operators. If I had know that the CavalierDaily.com URL was going to expire and the newspaper people had no clue what was about to hit them, I could have tried to register for the web site and ask the host service to reserve that site the moment it became available. I can then use it as the new site for my blog and the thousands of people who go to the site expecting to read the Cavalier Daily will instead get to read the saucy little things I write about my life.