The Big Word Project = Big Money?
The Big Word Project is the brainchild of two enterprising postgrad students in Belfast. You buy a word for a dollar a letter. There’s a lot of words in a dictionary, so they could get rich very quickly if this takes off. They were interviewed at Wired recently and it seems to be going well so far.
As usual, I’m raging that I didn’t think up this get rich quick scheme myself. 
It’s a gimmick but I love the idea and I dare you to resist buying a word! It’s impossible not to click on a couple of words just to see where you end up. Then you try out a few searches just to see if a word that means something special to you is still available. Then, you find one that is, and silly though it may be, it’s just so cheap to claim your very own word that you’re sold there and then. Genius.
A lot of web dev monkeys got in there before us, so the best I could get was "coders" but since our work site is tidy.ie we had to splurge $4 on "tidy" as well. It has great gift potential too: I couldn’t resist buying "foxy" for my sister, and my boyfriend suggested buying "couple" for us. Aw, who said romance was dead?
May 21st, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Thanks for the kind words Janine!
Paddy
May 21st, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I picked up “are” … really hard to find short words that weren’t already taken! They could make a fortune from the long tale of people picking up words for small amounts.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Thanks for stopping by Paddy and congrats on putting a great plan into action! Looks like you will be able to do a lot more than clear the student debt
Nice to discover your blog Alan and I’m glad you found a short word - they’re going fast alright… I can see myself making some more purchases. If I hadn’t wasted money backing Dustin to win Eurovision, I could afford longer words
June 30th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
The bid word project is impressive i agree. but i had issue with the word i wanted being unavailable so i searched and looked around and found another great page called projectword with the same principles and got the word that i wanted for the same price. you should check it out, http://www.linkinword.com
July 24th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
They seem to be doing well - but do these type of things really have any value?
Will they not been seen in the near future by Google and the likes as being ‘Paid Links’?
July 24th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Jeepers Jordan - don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that! I am sure that some have been abusing it for SEO reasons, but hopefully Google will realise that for most of us, it is a bit of fun, and at worst, will just ignore the links at some stage down the line??
July 24th, 2008 at 9:13 pm