When I first got back from London in 2005 I met with Mark Harris, then at the SSC, to introduce myself and begin the process of getting in touch with the local Wellington web community.
During the meeting I mentioned an anomaly to do with the naming of the government sub domain under the .nz domain. In the UK and Australia the government sub domain is .gov yet in New Zealand we went with .govt.
I asked Mark why?
He explained how in the very early days of the internet in New Zealand when the domain names system (DNS) was being agreed, one of the principles was that no sub domain should have the same name as a domain eg the domain .gov (used by US Government) could not be used as a sub domain.
What a stupid idea – I thought to myself, here we are staking our claim on a global platform and we decide to go it alone, uniquely. Think about all the confusion with people like me, who’ve just come back from a different country with a difference sub domain naming schema.
Mark was still talking so I refocused my attention.
It would be too expensive for us to backtrack now, Mark continued, that’s just the way it is. I told him I thought it was stupid and the conversation moved on.
Fast forward to last week and I was searching twitter for conversations about the New Zealand Government particularly surrounding the injurious name Gov2.0. Then it hit me.
What a good idea it was for New Zealand to go it alone by using the sub domain .govt so our local conversations are more easily discoverable on the global platform of the internet.
I called Mark to tell him I’d changed my mind.
December 17th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Thanks, Sam. I used to get asked that a lot, while I was managing the govt.nz space. While I didn’t anticipate Twitter back then, the value of unique was always apparent to me, and never more so than now.
December 17th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
No, thank you, Mark.
When my “conversion” occurred last week, it made me laugh - my views have shifted 180 degrees but still backed up with the same reason (the global nature of the net).