If you’ve already forgotten the old version, compare with this, although it doesn’t show the two columns that may have saved space but ultimately produced a confused chronology.

More promising, Slate has turned its blogs-in-name-only (BINOs?) into real deal blogs, complete with permalinks. For years, the site’s handful of blogs were published using the same software as its news articles. In fact, it wasn’t really clear which were columns and which were blogs; until recently, only Kausfiles read as you would expect of a blog. Here is his page now:

This redesign is actually a throwback to the old Kausfiles.com, which Kaus published on his own in the late 1990s until agreeing to be acquired (and paid) by Slate. And it is Kaus who probably benefits the most; because Slate’s software couldn’t automatically create permalinks, if he wanted to make it easy for someone to link, he would have to build an anchor tag by hand. And making writers learn to code detracts from what they’re best at: writing.

There are still some kinks to be worked out. If you click on “Kausfiles” from the front page sidebar, it brings you not to the blog itself but to a list of recent headlines, some of which are oddly duplicative. Better then is to just type kausfiles.com into your address bar, which brings you to http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/default.aspx, which is the screen capped above. That’s still at least one /blogs too many, but at least the permalinks are now search engine-friendly (including words from the title as opposed to randomly assigned numbers).

And if you think you can prune that back to http://www.slate.com/blogs/ and find a list of Slate’s blogs, well, no… and you may see a little farther up Slate’s skirt than either of you had bargained for:

Thank you for being so welcoming! What’s that… join, you say? Well, why not? Here I am:

And in fact, I now have an account with Slate that allows me to… well, I’m not quite sure. Almost certainly nothing, I am fairly sure. But if Blog P.I. moves to Slate, you’ll be the first to know.

What about spellings with more than two Gs? A few minutes of casual WHOISing reveals the answers:

• I am actually surprised that Diggg.com is not in use, being that the most plausible misspelling. Something is definitely there, but the server only times out. The domain is registered to someone in Oslo, Norway whose first name is Kristian and last name contains letters that will not render in my browser.
• Digggg.com is more what you’d expect: A parked domain which serves Google contextual ads. It’s registered to somebody in Boise, Idaho who probably has many, many more pages like this one.
• How about Diggggg.com? That you can register at your favorite registrar. It’s not taken. If you do decide to pick it up, why not leave a note in the comments?

Twelve hours later, there is one perfunctory tweet. In fact, it appears this account was created with one purpose in mind. That’s reflected in the e-mail above and, publicly, in the sidebar:

Count this as an overlooked reason why Twitter will succeed: its endless capacity for mischief.

Entire Blogosphere Stunned By Blogger’s Special Weekend Post
November 28, 2007 | Issue 43•48

NEW YORK—In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday.

The landmark post, which updated nearly every member of the global online community on the shelf Tiedemann was building, was linked to by several thousand sites, including Daily Kos, Digg, and The New York Times.

Wow, what a special treat this was for all of us,” said Talking Points Memo head blogger Joshua Micah Marshal, who, along with all other bloggers, checks Tiedemann’s site every day just in case something monumental occurs. “I thought I was going to have to wait until Monday to find out if Ben decided to put [the shelf] in his bedroom or the living room. The pictures were great, too.”

Within two hours of going live, Tiedemann’s 15-word post received 34,634,897 comments.

But who is Ben Tiedemann? It turns out, he’s one of their one-shot op-ed “contributors.” In fact, “Ben Tiedemann” boasted about his blog in The Onion in May of this year:

Follow the given URL, and it turns out Ben Tiedemann Tells All is a real blog, although it’s not much of one. Between May 14 and 16 of this year, someone — one assumes the true author of the initial article (and very likely the latest one) — grabbed the Blogspot account named above and created an account to post… garbled poetry? Here’s the initial post, in its entirety:

here are the launch codes you asked for

one day I’ll say give me back
the charts and graphs of my youth
that once defended the world stage
the apocalyptic drift takes it all in
totalling all the extra doors with ways

they’ll say strange things exist in what he is
no one will ever see the last of it for sure
one must learn not to learn the language
thank the easiness of cutting up the effects
build in an ornamental discussion of meaning
and three things have elements of or on blank

there are reasons to see the sunrise
that would prove extremely disturbing
if revealed to the general public then
this time of global wealth creation lifestyle
for the reign of absolute ecstasy can’t end
the next in the order of which came first
there it is sound and sense together in love
you can hear it in the constant little facts

There is a Gmail address associated with the Blogger profile, so I sent “Ben Tiedemann” a message earlier this week, but haven’t heard back. I am quite certain the account has long since been abandoned. But if I hear anything, I’ll let you know.

Once Stephen Colbert signs off, and I’m not supposed to be asleep, I’ll usually click over to “The Tonight Show.” Sorry, Dave, but it’s mostly because Conan follows on NBC (the headline is supposed to be a reference to your line from Cabin Boy, though the wording is more like a Dan the Automator album).

Jay Leno’s “found on eBay” segment* is his most Conanesque skit, down to the big reveal — whether the ridiculous item on the block (tassel hats for house pets, a penny for $10, etc.) found a bidder. It’s a simple game, not dissimilar from Colbert adding comments to Amazon and iTunes, and anyone can play along at home. In fact, I’ve been playing all week.

On Tuesday, Mickey Kaus posted a brief (arguably immigration-related) item pointing toward the auction page (#170121848086) for twenty-six John McCain-related domain names:

Fire Sale? McCain domain names, on sale cheap (so far) on E-Bay. … [Tks. to reader M.W.] 7:22 P.M.

$150 for the lot, not an unreasonable estimate of worth and certainly lower than many premium domain names change hands for. And hey, there’s even “free” shipping (i.e. e-mailing some passwords)!

And yet, no bids. Here’s what the page looked like as of Thursday night:

During the week I checked in to see how the bidding was going — or wasn’t — down to the final seconds (I said I was watching closely) at “14:51:26 PDT” or 5:51 p.m. EDT:

But would an eBay sniper emerge at the last moment, from the McCain camp or possibly a rival, to secure the lot with a single bid?

Nope. Apparently cheap isn’t what it used to be.

Despite being linked by Kaus, the counter on the page only recorded ~740 views by the end of bidding — dozens of them being yours truly. According to eBay policy, the seller can post it again once more free of charge, so a second round may be attempted.

If so, it will probably be at a lower price point. But even $150 for 26 domains surely represents a net loss for the seller. (The price per domain works out to $5.75, but an individual buyer isn’t going to get initial registration that cheap.) It’s clear this domain hoarder was bailing on the investment: McCain’s moment seems to be over and the owner was trying to cut his losses. But his timing was off, not just his pricing.

And to be fair to the McCain campaign, they have no use for the domains. They already have JohnMcCain.com, for one thing. And the McCain Internet team is unlikely to borrow a slogan that makes no sense from someone who doesn’t put McCain’s interests first.

These domains are all parked courtesy of GoDaddy, so they aren’t causing the campaign any trouble. The seller doesn’t sound interested in launching an anti-McCain network, but even if he did, the domain alone wouldn’t make it a hit. The other three GOP frontrunners have each inspired anonymous oppositional blogs — shady, personality-free repositories of oppo material that go mostly unlinked and must be found via search. I haven’t seen one for McCain, but if one did materialize, it wouldn’t be among the campaign’s top concerns.

To don my Captain Obvious cap (temporarily removing my P.I. shades), having the perfect domain name contributes nothing to sustaining reader interest and confers no intrinsic value. Several of the most popular political blogs started on or still operate on a blogspot.com subdomain.

The usefulness or danger of an independent McCain-themed website is not determined by domain, but content. Type-in traffic is neat but miniscule. Search traffic is worth more, but won’t build an audience. Still the best path to large and sustained volumes of traffic is by being interesting and getting bigger websites to link it.

These domains may be SEO optimal, but they sure sound canned.

Bonus: Full list of 26 domains that nobody wants, with analysis, excerpts of the sales copy — and a resolution to that dangling asterisk — after the jump.

*Alas, no video. NBC gets its content pulled from YouTube when it wants to, and it wants to.

You here? Good. So, how blindly desperate does this promotional copy sound to you?

Thank you for visiting this exceptional auction. As you all know, John McCain is a Republican front-runner for the 2008 Republican Nomination, and in many polls, he is the favored winner of the 2008 Presidential Election. His distinguished service, both as a veteren [sic] and as a Senator from the State of Arizona, has placed him as a natural choice for Commander in Chief.

McCain is the man to watch, and McCain is the new LEADER of the Republican Party.

Nobody will dispute that McCain has served his country honorably and has legitimate foreign policy experience. But he’s not new, and nobody thinks he is the favored candidate right now.

What is up for auction today is TWENTY-SIX PREMIUM John McCain domain names. …

“ChooseMcCain.Com” and “2008McCainPresident.Com” (which has all the key words in one domain) are valued at over $20,000 each! I don’t know what the exact value of ALL the domains together is, but I guarantee you that they are only going to increase in value as we get closer and closer to the 2008 Presidential Election.

$20,000, eh? Then why wasn’t the asking price $40,000+? And you have to love the passive oice on “are valued.”

To be fair to the seller, the domains are are all .coms, which is a pretty good considering the proliferation of lesser-domains being registered — so this certainly demonstrates foresight.

Judgment, not so much:

• McCainScandal.Com sounds like good CYA, but what do you do with McCainBacon.Com? Isn’t his occasional anti-pork crusade at least something his supporters and opponents would like? Why not McCainPork.Com?
• Then there’s McCainAndAbel.Com and McCainAndAble.Com. Why would you search for McCain and Abel? And what’s to be profited by redirecting visitors to another site? Wouldn’t that be kind of a cheap trick?

And finally, if you’re still reading, the domains themselves:

• 2008McCainPresident.Com
• AmericaLovesMcCain.Com
• ChooseMcCain.Com
• GopMcCain.Com
• ILoveMcCain.Com
• JohnAndRudy08.Com
• MarinesForMcCain.Com
• McCainAndAbel.Com
• McCainAndAble.Com
• McCainBacon.Com
• McCainCan.Com
• McCainForMe.Com
• McCainForSecurity.Com
• McCainGop.Com
• McCainHistory.Com
• McCainInIowa.Com
• McCainIowa.Com
• McCainMania.Com
• McCainPrimaries.Com
• McCainScandal.Com
• McCainTheMan.Com
• McCainTrain.Com
• MilitaryForMcCain.Com
• USAMcCain.Com
• USSMcCain.Com
• WeLoveMcCain.Com

Zeigler’s unflinching verdict:

When you combine all these problems together, you end up with an email/web program that seems more like a Paypal scam than official campaign correspondence.

And I concur. I’ve been rebuked before for criticizing political sites that weren’t ready for primetime, but we’re talking the launch of a U.S. senator’s presidential campaign here.

Relatedly: Leaving work today, as I descended the Rosslyn Metro station’s Everest-esque escalator, coming up the opposite escalator was a small army of intermediate school students in blue ski caps, toting matching “Brownback for President” signs. It reminded me more than a little of Howard Dean’s not-so-perfect Perfect Stormers in Iowa circa January 2004.

I had to wonder: Where were they going? I sure hope it was Ruby Tuesday’s, because the Rosslyn neighborhood of Virginia is strictly a business district. If it was a rally for the benefit of WJLA-TV’s cameras, it sure isn’t reflected on their website.

And I almost feel like I’m piling on unfairly by mentioning that Brownback’s announcement was buried on Page A08 of Sunday’s Post. But not quite.

As Not Paul Begala noted this weekend, the first day of your campaign is supposed to be your best. Since Brownback’s campaign already faces steep odds, he’d better be hoping this aphorism is wrong, too.

In our previous installment, I went digging through WHOIS to determine the availability of domains calling for the impeachment of 2008’s crop of presidential contenders. It may be too early to consider any of them locks for their respective party nominations, but it turned out that it’s not too late to plan for their removal from office.

I’m not sure these observations are worth much, but obviously I believe they are worth a blog post:

• According to the available information, it appears that none of these domains were registered prior to 2003 and most were snapped up in just the last year, which suggests that all the the resgistered domains in fact refer to the each candidate, and not say, other people named Clark or Paul. This seems to be true even of ImpeachKerry.com and ImpeachKerry.org, but it is also possible they were previously maintained through another registrar.
• The biggest category of registrations are those with no identifiable owner: They are controlled through private registration intermediaries Domains by Proxy and the more obscure Domain Discreet of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. These include all the Edwards sites save one, ImpeachHillary.org and ImpeachHillary.net, ImpeachKerry.com and ImpeachKerry.org, ImpeachBrownback.com and — for some reason — ImpeachPaul.com.
• Which campaigns might have secured some of these domains? I found no smoking gun evidence, but if any, most likely John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. The registration of three Edwards-related domains through Domain Discreet — on different days but within two weeks of each other last December — is at least chin-stroke worthy. The .org, however, was registered 10 months earlier and through Domains by Proxy. If any one candidate is most likely to be hoarding domains, it’s Edwards — but that isn’t saying much. Clinton knows a thing or two about impeachment, but that’s about it.
• The identifiable registrants for Hillary Clinton’s sites are split among three individuals. I attempted to contact each, but as yet none have replied. Norman Livingston of Boynton Beach, FL owns ImpeachHillary.biz, but he seems to be un-Googleable. Michael Miller of Cincinnati owns ImpeachHillary.info, and there is an outside chance he is Republican lawyer and former Franklin County Prosecutor Michael Miller, although it would be quite a commute to Columbus. ImpeachHillary.com — the one domain which could conceivably fetch twenty-five large in a future online auction, belongs to another Miller: Mark L. Miller, a San Diego attorney and family man — apparently neither the Republican money man nor the Kentucky state police commish.
• Meanwhile, Obama sites are like potato chips — you can’t have just one. In late December, Michael Meder of Emeryville, CA helped himself to .net and .org. Then a few days after Obama’s announcement, Robert McKee of Austin, TX picked up .us and .info.
• The exception is ImpeachObama.com, which was registered to an entity called Registered to Protect From Squatters on July 15, 2004 — two weeks before Obama delivered his famous convention speech. The constitutional visionary here goes by the name DomainGoon, and he’s a pro, controlling ImpeachGilmore.com, ImpeachBiden.com and ImpeachVilsack.com as Script Registrations. (He — really, what woman would call herself “goon” anything? — maintains other prized domains, such as abughraib.com, registered two days after the April 2004 “60 Minutes II” report.) I believe it’s fair to credit him with ImpeachClark.com and ImpeachPataki.com — those are owned by a company called Sunlane Media LLC, which shares the same Encinitas, CA address and contact information as Script Registrations. Most of these were registered in the second half of 2006, but ImpeachBiden.com was picked up in December 2004, the day after Biden told Don Imus: “I’m going to proceed as if I’m going to run.” And ImpeachClark.com was registered Sept. 11, 2003, the week before Clark threw his hat into the ring the last time. The guy is good.
• John Wall of Cincinnati ties with DomainGoon for the most impeachment domains, but has the clear edge in both candidate and TLD prestige: ImpeachMcCain.com, ImpeachRomney.com, ImpeachRichardson.com, ImpeachGiuliani.com, ImpeachGingrich.com and ImpeachGingrich.net. All but Romney were registered on June 19, 2005 — the exception was registered on the surprisingly late date of December 2006.
• ImpeachBiden.org belongs to someone named Daniel Cook of Chicago, who has owned it since November 2005. According to Amazon’s social network 43 Things, Cook or someone with the same “cookforpresident” handle wants to “have sex a lot,” “have sex today,” and “have sex eight times in one day.” As yet (if 43 Things is up to date) he has accomplished none of these things. Just saying. Also, I don’t know which Cook is being referred to, but my money is on Dane Cook. Which would explain a lot, but not the interest in Joe Biden.
• Mini-tycoons include Joseph Culligan of Miami, FL (ImpeachMcCain.org, ImpeachMcCain.net) Charles Wallace of Spokane, WA (ImpeachKucinich.com, ImpeachEdwards.us) and Barney Schlacks of St. Louis, MO (ImpeachRomney.net, ImpeachGiuliani.net).
• None of the sites are earnestly in opposition to the candidates named, most of the domains lead to parked pages with ad links and some don’t load at all, but there are some unusual ones.
• ImpeachClark.com, oddly enough, leads to Hated.com, which seems like the political version of a parked domain — it’s a guide to a number of popular liberal sites such as BartCop and Raw Story, but only links one true blog: Bill Scher’s Liberal Oasis.
• ImpeachMcCain.com features apparently-original text previewing McCain’s ‘08 bid, and almost feels like a tribute site — with a photo gallery! — but also features conspicuous Adsense and makes sure to quote McCain’s infamous Chelsea Clinton joke.
• ImpeachGingrich.com and .net both redirect to AboutEating.com, the website of a culinary celebrity in Wall’s hometown of Cincinnati.

And that’s about all I found. If I’ve missed anything important, let’s hear it in the comments.

This gives me an idea. With the 2008 presidential race stepping up a notch this past week, I wondered: What’s available to the aspiring impeachment activist or politically-aware cybersquatter?

To answer this question, I ran a series of impeachX.com domain searches at Network Solutions. For the purposes of this exercise, I went off the list of legitimate candidates from Politics1.com (sorry, St. Michael Jesus Archangel). In the case of Sen. Clinton, I assumed any impeachclinton domains would be related to her impeached husband. Past a certain point, there were several domains for whom no candidates had any associated registrations: .tv, .ws, .bz, .de, .co.uk and .eu. Mostly to save column space, I have Photoshopped them into oblivion.

I then organized the list in descending order from the candidates nobody expects to be impeaching to the most likely candidates for impeachment starting in 2009. Where candidates had an equal number but different domains registered, I defaulted to NetSol’s order of premium-ness. All other ties were decided by the alphabet.

Without further ado, here is the complete list:

Alas, this doesn’t tell us who registered these sites or when, to say nothing of why. Which campaigns were already wise to domain-hoarding? Who do the speculators like? Are any of these sites unrelated to 2008? Are any of them even active? I’ll try to answer those questions later this weekend.