Does Jonathan Phillips own 98402? (28. August 2007, 00:16 by Derek Young) ~ Own your own ZIP code!
We noted something funny the other day … Jonathan Phillips owns 98402. And 98403. Actually he owns a fair number of Tacoma zip codes for that matter.
Surprised?
Jonathan Phillips has registered domain names for every vaguely north end or downtown zip code. 98402, 98403... through 98409.com all point to ElectJonathan.com, the site he used during his campaign for City Council Position #8.
Most other Tacoma area zip codes are held by a web-hosting company called Moniker and provide the standard placeholder text with a search bar if you happen to land on one of them.
But from our scouring, it appears that Phillips has the lock on 98402 – 98409, as well as 98465 in West Tacoma and 98465, which is Fircrest.
Right now these all point to his campaign site, but count us among the curious who want to know what they’ll point to next. Yeah, he could always point them to his real estate work… but we’re hoping for something a little more creative.
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Funny stuff. There’s money to be had in that sort of thing, for sure, whether used for business or politics. I’d imagine, in the long run, they be far more useful in the real estate space than the political space. Folks don’t normally search on a zip for a candidate but are sure to probably want a home. More money in that sort of thing, too.
2 | Posted by KevinFreitas | Aug 28, 06:32 AM
weird, i thought marchex owned most of the zips in the US, and assumed they’d have the local ones. i hope he does something fun with them after, i’m tired of domain squatting – though understand it’s quite the lucrative biz
3 | Posted by nitsuj | Aug 28, 09:49 AM
Dood, all the zip codes in the world wont stop Marilyn Strickland from smoking this pencil-neck weenie for breakfast, lunch & dinner come november.
He should invest his money buying up negative domains like phillipsucks.com, you know like how Karl Rove bought up all the bushsucks.com domains.
4 | Posted by RR Anderson | Aug 28, 12:19 PM
RR, Phillips is already out of the race. Why do we even have a primary in non-partisan races?
5 | Posted by Kitty | Aug 28, 12:27 PM
wait… so in november it’s just going to be the one person? Nobody else gets to run against because there were not enough votes in the primary? That’s messed up!
6 | Posted by RR Anderson | Aug 28, 12:59 PM
Well, the top two move on to the general of course. In this case Curry and Strictland, however in a non partisan race I am not sure what the point of that is. She’s a few thousand votes ahead of him, I mean it’s possible for him to win, but it is extraordinarily unlikely. The only race that is not rather predictable at this point is the Spiro/Moss race. Ultimatly all of these races could have been decided on one ballot in November – with the top vote getter winning.
And back to the actual subject, I think Phillips has been doing web page ‘stuff’ as a side line/hobby for years.
7 | Posted by Kitty | Aug 28, 06:18 PM
Kitty is right, I’ve been registering domains and fooling around with websites since the early 1990s. I registered some of Tacoma’s zip codes years ago back before any of the ‘big boys’ thought about doing that and keep them just for the heck of it. I don’t expect to and in fact haven’t made a profit off of any of it. The domain pointing thing I did during an odd moment in the campaign just to see how difficult it was (not very). In-tacoma’s list of domains on the IP where I have a shared hosting account shows about 7 or 8 that are mine. The rest are other people paying monthly thinking they aren’t squeezed into a server with 100 others. As for being in the domain squatting business…good lord, just because I had the hubris to run for City Council doesn’t automatically equate to being an Evil Overlord of the Internet! ;-)
PS. No one actually ‘owns’ a domain…we can only register them until we forget to renew.
9 | Posted by Jonathan Phillips | Sep 8, 01:43 PM
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