No, I'm not talking about me. I've never written for the Huffington Post. I'm talking about my 16-year-old daughter, Chloe Spencer.

Some of you may remember (and are perhaps also sick of! ) me bragging about Chloe's Neopets SEO blogging success and the resulting media attention and her past speaking engagement at BlogHer '07. Well...

First, I'm proud to announce that Chloe's back on the speaking circuit! Later this month she will be speaking at SMX West, on the "Google Generation" panel. (I'm speaking too, on a different session: "Unraveling URLs and Demystifying Domains.") Look for us if you're going to SMX too!

Secondly, Chloe stretched her talents in a different way, by writing a guest blog post on The Huffington Post, published earlier this month. I'm so proud! I'm excited to watch her grow as a writer -- beyond Neopets game cheats and girly quizzes to something more meaningful to her. The opportunity was generously provided to her by Huffington Post columnist Erin Kotecki Vest. Erin also blogs on BlogHer.org. Erin knew of Chloe from BlogHer '07 -- she caught the buzz about "the teen blogger" speaking at the conference. In the post, titled "Who Me, Save the World?" and re-titled by Erin as "COUP! 16-year old Takes Over Huffington Post, Chloe's 800-word piece is about how she wants to make a difference in the world through her dream of becoming a documentary filmmaker, how she is inspired by the likes of Michael Moore, Mark Achbar and Al Gore, etc. Here's a small excerpt...

I confess to not being a regular reader of Huffington Post until very recently. I actually didn't know much about its founder either, Arianna Huffington, until I had the pleasure of hearing her give one of the keynotes at IIR's"THE Conference on Marketing" last week. Arianna was a great speaker and an inspiring lady. Here are a few points Arianna made during her presentation that I jotted down:

How true that last quote is, unfortunately!
I was surprised to hear that the Huffington Post gets 250,000 comments per month and that they employ comment moderators to work around-the-clock. Wow, quite an operation!

Be careful when converting your company name / brand name into an (available) domain name; it can have embarrassing repercussions.

I was reminded of this fact recently when seeing an email in my inbox that was sent to multiple recipients, including myself. One of the recipients was someone at arsecommerce.com. This domain name may appear rather ordinary to us Americans. But to those who speak "the Queen's English" - including those in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand - I bet they get a chuckle when they see it. I can imagine them thinking to themselves "Is this the company that put the "arse" in commerce?". The company is ARS Ecommerce, not Arse Commerce.

Company names that work well in one context may not work so well in another. I remember a classic example of this from a hilarious piece in Business 2.0 magazine (circa 2001) called "Boo! And the 100 Other Dumbest Moments in e-Business History". Here's the money quote:

In my post on the News.com blog titled "Eleven steps to buying a domain name that doesn't suck, I give another classic example of a domain name faux pas: therapistfinder.com. No, it's a site for finding therapists, not rapists.

You also have to consider whether your choice of domain name will get you inadvertently blocked by email firewalls or the search engines' adult filters.

Take for example this parts store - partsexpress.com - hyphenating the two words would have been a good idea. Ditto for whorepresents.com, an agency that represents celebrities.

Here are a few other examples of domain names gone horribly wrong:

While these are pretty funny (and/or disturbing, depending upon your point-of-view), these are reputation management nightmares. Sadly, they were all preventable -- usually with merely a well-placed hyphen or change in keywords. NYCanal.com could have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment by choosing ny-canal.com or newyorkcanal.com instead.