The wet dog runs at midnight

From where I sit –on a rainy summer morning with a real live wet dog at my feet — there are two possible stories:

1) Two business partners knowingly take a flyer on a high-risk business model (See Tim Nye aka nyehouse on “golden goose” circa 2004) that they hope will sustain itself until they get their new acquisitions up and running. Sure it’s risky, but it’s been three years so why not one or two more?

2) One business partner gets a very nasty shock. Now, some people have assumed — wrongly — that I feel sorry for this business partner, which isn’t the case at all. Why would I? For me it’s a great story about a bunch of people who with all their MBAs, Web 2.0 “insight and expertise,” knowledge of “serial entrepreneurs,” etc., got taken to the cleaners by a Willy Loman type who finally got lucky.

This is a great story if it’s the story, but it’s not going to happen without sources — and I’m not talking about wet dogs in the comments section — because until someone who really knows what happened tells me or shows me how to find out, it’s all idle speculation about a lot of people who have a real interest in this story not being told.

So thanks for now to the deep throat who pointed out that if you go into the Wayback Machine you’ll find that Geosign was still noting that it had “a large domain name portfolio providing direct navigation traffic to advertisers of consumer products and services” right up until September 2006, after which it redesigned its website and decided to be not quite so open about that particular part of the business. I interpret such a move as support for possibility two but maybe it’s just me…

Meanwhile, I can be contacted via the e-mail address in my profile on the right or in the comments. Without sources — be they people or a paper trail or indiscreet web posts — this story dies. And certainly quite a few people would like that to happen, right?