Shrinking SalonMagazine.Com April 3, 1999 It had to happen sooner or later. David Talbot and Salon Magazine went out and got the rights to the Salon.com domain to augment their current URLs: SalonMagazine.Com, Salon.Net, Salon1999.com and the abbreviated SalonMag.Com.

I don't have any details on the terms of the deal. But it seems to include the exchange of the Salon.Net domain that Salon Magazine was using. Salon is also directing traffic from the Salon.Com domain to the old owners' new site.

Salon.Com's Domain Name History Janelle Brown a writer for Salon Magazine touched on this topic last year in an article looking at domains created to catch misspelled URLs. "And the Mojave of simple URLs has been a long lament of Web magazines who've had to resort to that burdensome "mag" moniker (or the even more laborious "magazine"), becoming the harder-to-find "Feedmag," "Cosmomag," or in our case, "Maximag." How many readers has Salon lost to the "cyber community of Salon professionals" that reside at salon.com?" Andrew Ross who is now Vice President of Business and Strategic Development at Salon Magazine talked about Salon.Com at a Seybold Conference in March, 1998. "We have no brand identity. What the hell is Salon? Hair and nails? In fact, one of the biggest problems we have is that we cannot, no matter what we do, at this time get Salon.com. It belongs to a hairdresser in Texas and he'll be damned if he's going to give that up. He thinks he's going to make a fortune out of Salon.com. So there we are. We don't have sort of a big brother to which we can attach ourselves and sort of be protected. We're not particularly legitimate."

Related links [1] Maximum Confusion; Salon Magazine. [2] URL as UI; Useit.Com, March 30, 1999. [3] The Salon Makeover; Wired Magazine. [4] Smart Organization for New Media; Transcript, Seybold Seminars New York/Publishing '98.