Imminent Domain

Byline: Robert MacMillan

Millions of people use the Internet each day to find jobs. Those who have tried it know that it can be a frustrating experience. How do you know if you posted your resume at all the right sites? Is it enough to just use Monster.com ? What about Careerbuilder.com ? What about your local newspaper's Web site? What about professional societies' Web sites? Wouldn't it be nice if there were a centralized resource?

The people who run the Internet address system think so. The nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) earlier this month approved a new .jobs domain . In theory, employers could create Web sites such as www.donaldtrump.jobs or www.washingtonpost.jobs.

The idea is to eliminate confusion in the online job hunting arena. The Society for Human Resource Management , which sponsored the domain, said that it found little consistency in how businesses post job openings on their Web sites. As the Wall Street Journal reported , "Many employers post openings somewhere on their own Web sites. But the vacancies can be hard to find, forcing job seekers to scour a home page for a link that might take several clicks to lead to a jobs section. The new suffix could eliminate that hassle."

Employers could create a new site ending in ".jobs." For instance, Dell Inc. 's jobs site could be www.dell.jobs, Walt Disney Co. 's could be www.disney.jobs.

Tom Embrescia , chairman of the company that hopes to manage the .jobs domain, Cleveland-based Employ Media LLC , told the Journal that it will start taking applications for sites in June. He said that the sites probably will cost less than $100 per name.

Initial employer response seems enthusiastic, the paper said. Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads , a recruitment firm in Kendall Park, N.J., told the paper that he thinks employers and job seekers will begin to flock to the domain after it goes live in June. Sprint Corp. 's manager of "sourcing strategies," Scott Biggerstaff (A name that suits the job, don't you think?) said that his company is considering getting a .jobs Web site to hire new talent.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think that .jobs might find itself on the breadline in a few years. The three reasons why? They're called .com, .net and .org.

Ask anyone you meet on the street what you're talking about when you say "dot-com," and they'll tell you it has something to do with the Internet. In negligibly fewer cases, they'll respond the same way when you ask about .org and even .gov, .edu, .us and .mil. Even the domains from some other countries are easily recognizable -- .fr, .de, .au and .jp don't take too much effort to figure out.

This is because those domains have been around practically forever. When the Internet was introduced into the public consciousness, it came with .com, .net and .org all wrapped up in a bow. We didn't need to know what they meant. We just knew that when you went to a Web site, you had to type that in. Many of us who first went online in college see .edu in the same light.

The numbers back up their popularity. As my colleague David McGuire reported , there are almost 35 million addresses registered to .com. Germany's .de and Britain's .uk follow in second and third place, and .net clocks in at No. 4.

Subsequent attempts to introduce new domains to the Web haven't enjoyed the same success. Did you know, for example, that ICANN introduced seven new domains into the mix -- five years ago? Readers familiar with technology and the way the Internet runs are disqualified from answering this question. I know you know. I'm asking the general public.

Those domains are .biz , .info , .name , .pro , .aero , .coop and .museum . Then there's .jobs, of course, as well as .travel. In the pipeline are .post and .mobi.

Some of these actually seem useful, though uncomfortably segmented. Dot-biz, one would reason, is a Web site for businesses. Dot-pro presumably is a Web site for professionals. You probably guessed which ones cater to cooperatives, the aviation industry and museums.

How many of these Web addresses have they sold? I admit that I didn't call every one of them this morning to ask, but it's safe to deduce that collectively they wouldn't even come close to cracking the top five domains.

It almost feels like 1999, this notion that adding new domains to the Internet would spark a conflagration of activity, commerce and money. As 2000 and the following years proved, .biz and its brethren created plenty of online acreage, but not a surplus of homesteaders.

There is nothing wrong with having as many new domains as we can handle, but the majority of the world's Internet users, regardless of their native languages and alphabets, think about the Internet in terms of .com. It's the prime real estate that businesses want so they can succeed online. After all, it doesn't necessarily mean anything to the casual computer user. It simply is the Internet.

Smashing Moments in Architecture

Vandalism in the name of art is the name of the game on eBay as the Mies van der Rohe Society seeks the lucky person who will get throw a rock through the 10-feet-high window of one of the architect's creations.

The building in question is Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology , and the "Smash Bash" event is designed to commemorate the steel-and-glass structure's 50th anniversary. As the society noted on its page, "You are bidding on the chance to be part of architectural history." It's also the chance to damage a building that Time magazine listed as one of the "greatest buildings in the world."

There are three days left in the bidding. The winning bid at our deadline is $1,525. Forty-two bids have been submitted so far, so you might as well jump on in.

Now That You've Filed Your Taxes...

Writing that check to the taxman might not have been the most stomach-churning part of filing your taxes. The General Accountability Office says in a new report that the Internal Revenue Service has taken a swiss-cheese approach to computer security, Reuters reported .

"The Internal Revenue Service also is unlikely to know if outsiders are browsing through citizens' tax returns, because it doesn't effectively police its computer systems for unauthorized use, the Government Accountability Office found," Reuters said.

More from the news service: "The IRS over the past several years has taken steps to protect the information it collects, the report found. The agency has fixed 32 of the 53 problems that turned up in a 2002 review, the GAO said. But the GAO found 39 new security problems on top of the 21 that remain unfixed."

Now here's the best part: The report wasn't released until yesterday, three days after the IRS triumphantly reported that more than half of individual taxpayers filed their returns online this year. Maybe the up-side is that hackers will be frozen into immobility by the abundance of information at their fingertips.

Blog Box for Red Sox

Here's a nifty idea straight out of Beantown: The Boston Globe is working with the Feedster.com Web site to present a large list of blogs about the Boston Red Sox . A quick glance at the site this morning provides items from blogs with names like " A Red Sox Fan in Pinstripe Territory ," " El Guapo's Ghost Rambles on about the Red Sox " and, predictably enough, " The Joy of Sox ." The site is pretty no-frills, a definite advantage for the casual visitor, though it is a bit text heavy. Hopefully it will look less like an inventory of every blog comment ever written about the team and morph into something a little cleaner. Whatever the presentation, it's a practical resource that shows how newspapers' Web sites are trying to incorporate more voices from their readers -- definitely a good step.

And the sports department here at washingtonpost.com would be irate if I didn't note the Washington Nationals blog that they're producing with our print-side colleagues.

Send links and comments to robertDOTmacmillanATwashingtonpost.com.

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