Thanks for the Relevant Links: Dear Frank
It’s election season, which means I’ve been visiting one of Frank Schilling’s web sites a lot.
Above: FactCheck.ORG
The U.S. Presidential election is less than two months away, and there’s one web site I’ve been visiting a lot lately: The Annenberg Political Fact Check. On this site you can read regarding both Obama’s and McCain’s lies and their skill and stretching the truth. (Yes, they both do it.)
There’s only one problem. Annenberg’s site is FactCheck.org, and I keep typing in FactCheck.com instead. Frank Schilling owns FactCheck.com, a parked domain full of “relevant links”.
This is perhaps Shilling’s most famous domain name. During the 2004 vice presidential debate, Dick Cheney mistakenly referred to FactCheck.com instead of FactCheck.org. This sent a flood of traffic to Schilling’s parked page and he was forced to redirect it since the traffic was taking his servers down.
Honestly, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference if Cheney had given the correct domain name to the millions of viewers. Many still would have typed .com. Following all, I’m a domain name expert and I’ve found myself on FactCheck.COM many times over the past month. It’s the natural thing to do. Our brains are trained.
As stated by Compete.com, FactCheck.com is among the top 300,000 most visited sites on the web.
