How did Challenge 1 go: giving KingCharl.es to King Charles?

Happy new year! I’m back to give you a blow-by-blow account of Challenge 1.

But first:

1. Challenge for you: Hi! You’re one of the first 50 subscribers to 12 Challenges — one of the original Challengeheads. So I’m asking a huge favour — please go out into the world and spread the 12 Challenges word to your tech-curious friends.

2. Comments: Please feel free to comment liberally at 12challenges.substack.com. In true 12 Challenges spirit, I consider it a challenge to be challenged on my challenges.

3. Expectations-setting: I’ll be sending up to 3 emails per week (although sometimes lower). Some will be directly related to Challenges, others will be more exploratory, but always with an eye to a future Challenge.

Housekeeping done. So now:

How did Challenge 1 go: Giving KingCharl.es to King Charles

Overall verdict: mixed bag 👜

As a first step, I’m proud of this challenge. The linkname was always going to be tough to get out there, and it didn’t get picked up as much as I’d have liked. It’s a little nerdy, a little clunky. But I believe the linkname has a solid future ahead. As a concept, it can only grow in adoption over time. I’m also proud of the letter I wrote to King Charles as a good summary of why linknames can be useful to the creative world in an age of platform dependency.

What I did

The first thing I did in Challenge 1 was coin a new concept called the linkname: a name that’s also a valid website. The point of the challenge was to raise awareness of linknames as way for creators to claw a little power back from Big Tech platforms. I wrote more about that here.

To raise awareness of linknames, I created a simple site (hosted on GitHub) defining them. Obviously I couldn’t resist doing this at the domain linknam.es, meaning that linknames now have their own linkname.

I posted linknam.es to Hacker News, the nerve centre of all new tech things online. Not much happened, but it fulfilled my objective of this specific definition of linknames being ‘officially’ out there. (The term has previously been used by IBM to describe a specific technical attribute, and by a startup which went on to change its name to PageName.)

The King Charles letter

Next, I wrote an open letter to King Charles, where I gave him the linkname of KingCharl.es:

I suggested to the King that he might want to restyle himself as KingCharl.es. Imagine the possibilities! He could host a Substack at that domain and talk directly to his audience, instead of…talking directly to his audience, from the balcony at Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, or countless numbers of spectacular locations perfectly geared for mass media.

Personally, I think the Substack option is way better.

In the course of the Challenge, I found out the King doesn’t have an email address, so I had to physically send the letter. I found out that handwriting a 5 page letter is no joke in paperless 2023. Also, the only stamp I could find was of the King’s mum. No disrespect intended.

I told Hacker News about the letter, and got an excellent suggestion of another domain to give the King from someone with a passion for Latin and numerical usernames (next Challenge: numbernames?):

The aim of this exercise was to get King Charles to accept the gift, and since I haven’t yet received a reply, I can’t really say I’ve succeeded.

I can only hope that his team has a big backlog of Christmas cards to get through, and that’s why I’m still in the dark. Or, more likely, someone read the letter and immediately threw it in the bin.

I’ll keep you posted if I hear back from His Majesty.

The will.i.am revelation

Next up, I made an important discovery with huge implications for the history and adoption of linknames: will.i.am is the world’s most famous linkname.

The mega-famous musician and entrepreneur owns the domain i.am, and uses the subdomain will.i.am as a live domain. He doesn’t use this linkname to drive an audience directly, which is understandable since he has no problem with audience-building. But he does use it to promote his latest startup, FYI.

FYI exists at the domain fyi.fyi, giving further proof that will.i.am and I share a common passion for doing funky things with domains.

This led me down a rabbit hole of looking up will.i.am’s FYI co-founders on LinkedIn, which took me to his own personal LinkedIn and the discovery that the most recent post of this global superstar, 3 months ago, yielded 24 reactions and 1 comment — roughly the same as my own last post. Checkmate!

His post also showed that he’s not afraid to use his ownership of the i.am domain to make nerdy jokes. I love it. Very on brand for linknames.

Obviously, I couldn’t resist reaching out to him and his FYI co-founders alerting them to his status as unwitting linkname pioneer.

Once again, I didn’t hear anything back, but still hope to convince will.i.am to embrace the concept of linknames and become Chief Linkname Evangelist, shining a weirdly-punctuated light for the creative community on the path towards audience-owning independence.

In the land of names

I came across a few more unusual names in the course of this challenge, which gave me hope for the possibility of linknames being widely adopted.

First, there’s rising R&B star Liv.e, whose name is oh-so-close to being a linkname with that dot in it — although unfortunately .e is not a valid domain ending (in fact, there are no single-letter domain endings, known as TLDs).

Then there’s the artist ceo@business.net, who is a pioneer of something we can probably dub a mailname:

Although to truly qualify, they’d have to own that email address. So I sent them an email, which bounced. Unsurprising, given that the domain business.net is probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars:

I found out that they do, however, own the domain ceoatbusiness.net, so I suppose ceo@business.net is kind of a linkname. Albeit one that’s even more confusing than the average linkname.

What I find heartening about both these names is that they show you can become a successful artist with an awkwardly-punctuated name. This means one of my main worries about linknames — how tricky they are to spell — is perhaps not such a big deal.

Irons in the fire

I reached out to a few more celebs, to see if I can convince them to use a linkname — either for their main identity, or more realistically for a side project.

Nothing back yet, but I’ll be following up and (ever-so-slightly delusionally) hope to get some good news.

I’ve learnt that it’s inevitable there’ll be a few things outstanding at the end of a challenge. That’s no problem — I’ll move ahead with Challenge 2 and drop back into linknames when I need to.

What else I could have done

I think it’s worth listing some things I considered, but didn’t do — mostly because I want to keep a good pace up with the Challenges.

• Prize fund: Set up a prize fund for creatives to use linknames. Although not sure where I would have got the money, and would take a while to bear fruit.

• Graffiti. Become a graffiti artist and dub a linkname on the walls in my neighborhood. Would require a total U-turn in my relationship with the law. Still thinking about it.

• Linknames generator. Make a tool for creatives to easily come up with linknames for their next project, modelled on Domain.Garden.

• Mock-up of KingCharl.es. Make a tongue-in-cheek mock-up of what the KingCharl.es website might look like if he used it to engage with his audience, complete with Follow button, merch section, live stream.

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So that’s all for Challenge 1! Next, I’ll be doing some exploratory writing as I define Challenge 2.

Back soon — and for now, please share 12 Challenges with anyone you think would be interested.