Re: Trademarks, random strings, sharing, reserved words

[Brad Templeton <brad@alto.clari.net>]

> 	This may seem a small point, but I happen to think it is
> fundamental:  most of us do not get most of our phone numbers from a
> directory.  (Yeah, your mileage may vary, but the key point is that a great
> many phone numbers are obtained by a variety of other techniques.)
> 
> 	I get most phone numbers from people's mouths (...) and from other
> people's business cards.  Occasionally I get them from .sig fields or home
> pages.

And so on the net most domain names are entered without typing, in URLS
on in replying to mail messages.  The name doesn't even matter to me in
that case.  It matters when I have to type it.

Now when it comes to phone numbers I carry around my own personal
directory.  I've memorized a few score numbers, but when I need to
phone most people I consult a private directory or the public one.

Most phone numbers are not memorable, though some are either because they
have nice digit patterns or an alphabetic string.

If you want to duplicate the world of phone numbers, that's fine, but we
can do better.  We can have a system where the names are memorable and
easy to type.