Stanford CIS

Happy Holidays...

By Dave Sidhu on

Generally around this year, I receive a number of requests for financial support from charitable organizations, civil rights groups, and the educational institutions I attended. Interestingly, the New York Times reported yesterday that New York University (N.Y.U.), in the words of George Washington professor law Orin Kerr, is "data mining for donors":

Each day, Lekha Menon, the director of prospect management and research at N.Y.U., and four staff members pore over more than a dozen newspapers and electronic news and data sources, looking for names of alumni, parents of alumni or parents of students. They also look for notable donations to other causes, promotions, appointments to corporate boards and records of securities transactions....

Not all that work is done by the university itself. In 2003, at a cost of $50,000, N.Y.U. sent the names and last known addresses of 140,000 alumni identified as possible donors to an electronic screening company, Kintera, which specializes in gathering information from public records for nonprofit and educational institutions. The goal was to obtain current information on their worth, location and background.

Whenever the university holds fund-raising events outside New York, its development team examines the wealth of the local ZIP code and may check to see who in the alumni database lives there.

In the light-hearted spirit of the holidays, I thought I'd share another interesting article from the Times about one of my favorite comedians, Conan O'Brien:

At the end of [a skit "about absurdist college sports mascots," including "F.S.U.'s" Horny Manatee], in a line Mr. O’Brien insists was ad-libbed, he mentioned that [a] voyeur... was watching hornymanatee.com. There was only one problem: as of the taping of that show, which concluded at 6:30 p.m., no such site existed. Which presented an immediate quandary for NBC: If a viewer were somehow to acquire the license to use that Internet domain name, then put something inappropriate on the site, the network could potentially be held liable for appearing to promote it.

In a pre-emptive strike inspired as much by the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission as by the laws of comedy, NBC bought the license to hornymanatee.com, for $159, after the taping of the Dec. 4 show but before it was broadcast.

By yesterday afternoon hornymanatee.com... had received approximately 3 million hits, according to NBC.

I'm pleased to note that as of the 24th, the site has apparently received 11 million hits. While the success of the Horny Manatee is impressive, I'm disappointed that another Late Night character has not gained such acclaim - a certain bear who is not, ahem, master of his domain.

What happened in NBC's case is not unusual. For example, Fox bought whatbadgerseat.com and Dorks-Gone-Wild.com when the domain names were mentioned on episodes of The Simpsons.

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I wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday season!