Riding the .co wave
I’m no stranger to the “co” phoneme. When Jelly was featured in a CNN broadcast a couple of years back, the genius anchor likened coworking communities to pot-smoking communes and fraternities he seemed to nostalgically remember from his college years. Coworking communities are extremely different, and I believe represent a healthier side of capitalism than we’re used to seeing lately, but that’s for another post.
Using “co” in front of a word is a quick way to communicate that people are doing something together. Coworking. Cohousing. Codrinking. Easy. Got it.
Coworking itself incorporates other critical “co”s: community and collaboration, among others.
A shorter, snazzier URL
So when I learned that the new .CO TLD was becoming publicly available last summer, I was excited. The previous domain for New Work City, nwcny.com, was serviceable, but nwc.co would be far nicer. I reserved the domain and, when the service went live, we were proud owners of the 61,534th .CO domain name.
We were able to get a domain whose .com equivalent is probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it’s a whole character shorter! Having a domain as short as the URL shortening service bit.ly means we had our own handy short URL service. For manual links relating to New Work City, I could easily point people to short addresses. Need the FAQ? nwc.co/faq. Membership? nwc.co/membership. You could pretty much guess a link and there’s a good chance it will be there. We also use Bit.ly Pro to generate our own short URLs when on social networks. The link I’ll use for this post, for instance, is http://u.nwc.co/hm-co-wave
Having the domain was, on its own, really cool and worthwhile, but the story of our relationship with this fancy new TLD is just getting started.
More than just a domain
Moving our site to nwc.co was part of an overall effort to relaunch New Work City. Along with it, we launched a new site, and a Kickstarter campaign to match. All of this was part of an effort to raise interest and money to support our new coworking space. Our Kickstarter project was a big success, mostly financed by friends of mine in the community, but it was also great because we made some new friends. One such person, Lori Anne Wardi, made a very generous contribution out of the blue.
Who the hell was this person giving us all this money? Well, she’s part of the team of people behind the .CO TLD. And it turns out that they’re rather awesome folks.
Over the course of the next several months, we had a bunch of online conversations and, at SXSW, we got to hang with them in person and share many great stories over delicious food and drink. We may or may not have danced to a certain iPad DJ’s sweet dance jams.
Along the way, I learned that, for them, the new TLD was a chance to create something of a movement. To them, .CO was not going to be another .biz or .info, TLDs whose perceptions are equated with link farms and phishing scams. Their mission is to make .CO the new home of people who are building awesome things. That’s a big task to undertake.
So there was a Super Bowl ad. And billboards in prime locations. And, I learned, there was a documentary crew.
Under the Bulb
New Work City, it turns out, had caught the attention of the fine folks behind .CO. To them, we represented what they wanted .CO to be about. To that end, they asked me if I would be interested in being featured in a special video series about the people behind the companies that use the .CO TLD. Being the sucker for cameras that I am, I obliged.
So, for two days in April, we had a really awesome film crew in the space, interviewing NWC members and recording all sorts of things. They even followed me around on the subway and to a surprise birthday karaoke barbecue party that my fabulous girlfriend organized.
Two other fine folks, Rana and Neil, got the same treatment. We’re the first three people they’re featuring on a site called Opportunity.co, in a new campaign that just launched called Under the Bulb.
I have to say, the film crew knocked it out of the park. They’re called Big Fish Entertainment, they’re based in DC, and I am now their biggest fan.
Premiere Party this Thursday!
To celebrate the completion of the project, we are hosting a premiere party at New Work City this Thursday at 7:00. If you’ve never been to a NWC party, I can assure you: we’ve never had one that wasn’t awesome.
After all this, I still believe our relationship with the fine folks at .CO is just getting started. I’m looking forward to working with them on a lot of cool stuff in the future.
In the meantime, check out the site and the excellent videos!
