So, um, farewell then. A tiny piece of internet history overseen by the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute has finally, sadly, run its inauspicious course.
'.um', the domain suffix assigned to the minor outlying islands of the United States, was also something of a geography lesson for those who may have been unaware of these nine insular American possessions, including three whose microscopic populations make the likes of the Falklands look positively cosmopolitan by comparison.
No more. Last week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) unanimously voted to deregister the suffix. A surprising move, no doubt, for some, and perhaps even more surprising to those who had never heard of the name in the first place.
In recent years, new top-level domains such as '.eu' for Europe and '.mobi' for mobile phones have been created and taken up with varying levels of success. ICANN is also currently re-looking at plans to create '.xxx' for the seedier side of the internet.
Poor '.um', however, was judged to be an idea whose time never really came, unlike '.tv', which provided a financial windfall some years ago to the small South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu.
The Californian institute only ended up controlling it, from 1997, because its staff were then in charge of what is known as the Domain Name System. Nobody, they argue, was ever interested in the domain, and nobody had registered for it.
But in a wry comment piece, writer David Utter argues that this may have been a missed opportunity. 'Tedi.um', suggests Utter, could have made a great home for yet another social networking site, with 'strat.um' a perfect name for selling a certain brand of guitar and - an academic angle, finally - 'cerebell.um' for the next great neurology conference.
Surely other international academic possibilities were also overlooked. Um.um could have been picked up by the universities of Manchester, Miami, Michigan and, in Australia, Melbourne. And how many scholarly gatherings this year might have benefited from the creation of a snazzy website along the lines of symposi.um? Or podi.um? Even rostr.um?
Shame on the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute for not using its collective crani.um.
