Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Another Another Monkey

Shortly after I started this blog, I noticed that the address http://www.anothermonkey.com went from having a message of "This page cannot be found" to "This name has recently been registered by one of our clients." I assumed this was a cybersquatter, possibly the work of a bot that would seek out newly-registered blog names and try to grab related top-level names on the assumption that the blogger might eventually want the top-level name and might be willing to pay a hefty price for it. Not me. But I was curious as to what might appear at that address.

Yesterday I took a look over there and found a full-fledged website that looks like it's been up since July 5. It's the online portfolio of a Joanne Green, who is apparently based in the UK and is working on a Master's Degree in Creative Imaging. I will eventually put a link on my site to her site, and maybe I will ask her to put a link to mine; there are few things so annoying as thinking you're on one website when you're actually on a completely different one (I once spent some time at the website npr.com before I realized it wasn't npr.org - now the .com address seems to have been acquired by National Public Radio, and simply redirects users to npr.org.)

I never claimed that Another Monkey was an original name, and that's part of the point: we are all just monkeys on typewriters here. I was glad I was able to get this blog name before somebody else claimed it, and before I created it I did a Google search for other uses of the phrase. There were a few reviews on Amazon and Epinions by someone called anothermonkey, there appears to be a punk band by that name, there are quite a few references to "Another monkey island blog!", and quite a few people have used the apocryphal-sounding quote "Never monkey with another monkey's monkey." There will probably be more uses of the term in the future. I wasn't the first, and I won't be the last. Maybe we can find hope in the fact that there will always be another monkey, somewhere!

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