In this time, online presence is an important thing. In the same way that kids might some day regret those posts on facebook that show them making mistakes, someone with a serious point to make in their career and working life would do well to to be courteous, fair and above all, scrupulous.
If you didn’t manage that, then you could well imagine that your business indiscretions would no longer be private, but would be forever available for the world to see and no amount of appeals to google to hide it would work. How embarassing and financially damaging would it be to be, say for example, Ken Lynge Primby, the “recruitment agent” mentioned in this story here about the Bankruptcy Rat? Yes, the “IT Bankruptcy Rat”, a literal translation from Danish by a respected IT publication.
Imagine then if that man forgot, or otherwise failed (maybe due to other financial commitments?) to renew important domain names such as connect.dk (which got listed prior to it dropping for 400,000 krone, wonder why it didn’t sell?) and primby.dk, the man’s own surname. Why, it’d be a very dangerous mistake to make, wouldn’t it?
Fast forward 2 years and primby.dk got registered after dropping by one of the people who he still owes a debt to. I suppose a desperate man might get worried and spot that :-
a) the person owed the debt hadn’t done anything with the website
and;
b) Maybe wanted to move on with his life, if only he was finally paid the money he was still owed and could forget it all, healing the psychological damage done to him, his young children and partner.
Sigh, it never happened. I’d imagine, hypothetically though, that such a man might spot the domain hadn’t been renewed and was on the verge of dropping and might try and reclaim it by paying 75 kr to get on the dk-hostmaster “ventelist” (waiting list, to those wondering…) and nab it when it was free again.
Well, if not him, somebody did anyway.
And that’s what prompted me to renew it….