I've wanted to use the Internet's domain name system as a way to bookmark sections of outlines, feeds, maybe even smaller more atomic things.  

I think a domain name should be an easy, almost casual thing to allocate. Like the dialog that pops up when you Save a file for the first time.  

A domain name should be like a file name. That easy. It's kind of amazing that the Internet has gotten this far without anyone trying to simplify such a central concept. 

It feels like another idea, from 1999, called Edit this Page. "Writing for the web is too damned hard," it began -- and then explained how we had simplified it. That piece was seminal. It led to the software that led to blogging. It all happened very fast after that. 

Now the question is how to put together all the pieces we've created since then. Feeds, outlines, status messages, social networks, photos, videos. Taking complex things, bundling them and giving them simple names. Then doing more combining, relating and bundling. 

So I was working on domain-mapping for the world outline. I want to be able to give a name to a node in an outline. Then you can jump to that name in your web browser, where you see just that node and its subordinate material. Very simple. But giving it a name, that was still a matter of going to the domain registrar and wading through a complex set of dialogs.  

Today, the innovation was that I was able to enter the name in a dialog and the software took care of all the michegas, quickly. Save the outline and a second later view the new domain in my browser. Bing! 

To experiment we used a fun domain I had lying around, not doing very much.  

I plugged my photo archive into it, and then gave April 30, 2011 a special name: 

http://queensday.dickbar.org/  

Damned if it all doesn't work! Just like that. 

It's hard to show how that was simplified. Here's another address that gets you to the same place. The content is the same, but the context is way different.  

We have more work to do. I want to hook this up to dnsimple, they have a nice API, and they reached out to us early-on.  

We have to hook it up to RSS too. And then there are a lot of new concepts to explore. We now have a way of talking about sub-outlines without paths (and the linkrot they inevitably cause).