laughingmatters.com

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but rose.com would be worth twice as much.

That’s the conclusion of a highly respected business professor from highly respected Purdue University. He studied 52 companies that added ".com," ".net" or "Internet" to their names between June 1998 and March 1999. Upon comparing their stock prices five days before they changed their names and five days after, he discovered that, on average, the price of their stock rose 125 percent.

This mystified the professor, who wondered aloud if the stock market sets values rationally. Apparently, the business school faculty at Purdue is unfamiliar with The Theory of All Manner of Greed Associated With Any Damn Thing of a Cyber Nature. In this spirit, I’m calling my column (which has always run under the lackluster title "Laughing Matters") laughingmatters.com in the hope that I will receive double my usual stipend for writing it.

Many people besides me have figured out the value of the dot-com game. Take DotComGuy. Formerly an outwardly normal person, DotComGuy is a Texan who legally changed his name to DotComGuy and moved into a bare house, equipped only with the clothes on his back, a killer computer system with a high-speed modem and a modest array of 24 cameras so that he can do Web casts for the easily amused. Much in the manner that Madame Curie exposed herself to dangerous levels of radiation in the name of science, DotComGuy is exposing himself to dangerous levels of media hype in the name of electronic commerce. His quest is to show that you can get everything you need for life over the Internet, and to prove it, he will not leave his house for one year. And to further align him with the dot-com world, his sponsor will pay him $24 for his first month in the house, but double his pay every month thereafter, so that his total pay for the year will be $96,000, which, if he truly does stay inside his house and away from the rest of us, will be a bargain.

Not to be outdone by DotComGuy, the city of Halfway, Ore., has changed its name to Half.Com. For changing its name, the town received $75,000 and 22 computers from a company of the same name. The company hopes that the stunt will generate enough publicity to make the outlay worth its while. It’s even building Web sites for local businesses, including one that sells fish bait and another that purveys elephant garlic. Many residents think this is a great bargain for their community, while others point to similarly misconceived civic sellouts, like the tawdry story of the sell-your-soul residents of SpaghettiOs, Wyoming.

But no matter where you live, your Internet address connotes a certain status, or lack thereof. Your home used to be your castle, but now what’s important is your domain. For example, I am a "dot-com" person, but my friend Steve, who works for a public television station, is a "dot-org" person. He believes "dot-org" persons are more noble than "dot-com" persons because "dot-com" persons are in businesses where they try to make money, while his "dot-org" public television station has a more lofty goal than making money: It would rather beg and whine for it. I believe that the noblest persons are the "dot-edu" crowd, and that on the opposite end of the social ladder are the great unwashed "dot-net" rabble.

I think the world would be a better place if we showed more cleverness with our Internet addresses. Why hasn’t a fabric mill taken polka.com? Why is there no semiprecious gem outfit called peri.com? Shouldn’t a downsizing consultant have an address ending with re.org? I’d like to do business with a home-communications system company called inter.com, and if I were to buy bait anywhere in Half.Com, it would be from fish.net. And wouldn’t it be cool if there were a site where you could find profiles of wanted criminals — drag.net?

Even accountants could have some fun with this stuff. I could see them setting up a special invoicing site. You guessed it — 30days.net.

Dan Danbom will receive his usual exorbitant fee for this column.