Knock Knock WHOIS There?

You can still have fun while being corporate and while doing legal processes. One thing that brings me joy at work is to hear of the names we come up for entities.

There’s Automattic, of course, named after Matt. We have a few subsidiaries in other countries to help streamline employment matters for Automatticians in those countries. Aut O’Mattic in Ireland, Automattoque in Canada, Ministry of Automattic in the UK, Ausomattic in Australia, and so on.

There are a couple more I really enjoy: Knock Knock Whois There, LLC and Knock Knock Whois Not There, LLC.

Knock Knock Whois There is the .blog registry, the company that “owns” the rights to .blog. KKWT will coordinate with domain registrars who will actually sell the domain names to regular folks like you and me.

The second, Knock Knock Whois Not There, LLC is our private registration provider, a company that will proxy for you when registering for a domain name so you can keep your personal information private.

For the less-techy, “whois” is an old computing term for looking up, literally, who is the person behind the user name or domains name.

Our team names are, of course, pretty random and full of backstories, but those are internal names How many people know or care that I was on the “Aurora” team? Or that our sister team that we coordinate with is “Zen”. Or that an interteam squad between the two exists called “Dash” representing the dash from A-Z? Oh, you care? You’re probably the only one. I’m now the lead of the Earth team, which is one of four “elemental” teams that work together (Earth, Air, Fire, Water).

I really appreciate that we can have fun with external, official legal names. So, often, these things are the realm of groups of people trying to either sound so bland that no one will notice, or full of random buzz words, or something else boring.