Essayism.org
I spent months, if not years, thinking about publication architecture, essayism, essaying, inquiry, disposition, and the relations between them.
When I went to look for a domain name the market's intepretation of value was:
Essayism.org: $7 Essaying.org: $4300 Essaying.lol: $1.50
Which immediately raised the question: What exactly is being valued? A rwrailer says traffic. A PR person says keywords. A domain broker says scarcity.
As an essayist, I notice that none of these is the same thing as meaning.
In a strange way, this was a Montaignian moment. An apparently trivial fact became a point of entry into a larger inquiry. Fortunatrly for me, I'd rather own essayism.org than essaying.org even if they were the same price.
“Essaying” describes the practice. But “Essayism” describes the field.
The first tells people what I am doing. The second invites them to ask what the thing is. That's much more interesting. And, after all, every good essay begins with someone noticing that the thing everybody values is not necessarily the thing that matters.
My $7 domain registration of essayism.org may be a case in point. 😊
David Marshall
Skerries