Wednesday 1 April 2009

Wireless Cranium sells out!


For those who don't know the origin of the blog name Wireless Cranium, it's an homage to Radiohead, one of my favourite bands.
Radio = Wireless
Head = Cranium
Today I received the following email from someone identifying themselves as Lior F. Lapos:

Attention: Blog writer

I am writing to alert you that your blog may be in breach of the United States Internet Control Act (2005), which states the following:
If at any time, a registered business (as defined under C18-562A of the Industrial Act 1967) is unable to acquire a required domain name required of their business, due to the domain name being used by an individual (not a sole proprieter), they must take whatever means necessary to free up the domain name for use by said business.

UK band Radiohead achieved considerable success with their last album In rainbows, and were looking to expand their mainstream success in the United States. To this end, they have set up a fan club organisation (based in Los Angeles) in an attempt to improve their popularity in the States. They have chosen Wireless Cranium to be the name of this organisation.

As part of the startup of the fan club, they have attempted to register the Blogger domain wirelesscranium.blogspot.com but were disappointed to see that it has been taken by a 3rd party blog.

To avoid any breach to the aforementioned clause of the Internet Control Act (2005), you must action one of the following items within the next ninety (90) days:

(1) Surrender the domain name wirelesscranium.blogspot.com to the Wireless Cranium organisation. You will be permitted to relocate your blog to another domain name.

(2) Allow the Wireless Cranium business to use your domain name for advertising purposes at the ratio of 80/20 (where 80% of the site will be dedicated to advertising, 20% to original blogging material). You will be entitled to 50% of the advertising revenue. If the blogging rate exceeds this, further legal action may be taken.

I will be contacting you directly within the next week to determine which option you have selected.

Yours sincerely,
Lior F. Lapos.
So, there you go. Unfortunately I am not able to take option (1). I have many dedicated readers -- 7 subscribed through BlogLines alone, and I don't want to speculate how many Google Reader subscriptions there are, but I'd suspect it may be 3! I feel changing the domain name would be too disruptive to the people reading this blog.

So I have decided to take option (2), which means you'll be seeing a lot more ads on this blog.

I guess the upside of this is that there'll be a lot more posts; I have been pretty quiet lately.

I apologise to be the bearer of this news. But it's the unfortunate reality of the competitive blogging market.

I think this sums it up best.