Audeamus – How dare we…

© chrisdlugosz

A new domain you've discovered is offering a variety of Web hosting services that look useful for your business, but you're wondering who's behind the site and where its owners stand on a variety of environmental and social issues. Where do you go to find out?

With the influence of the Web growing, transparency has become a major concern on the Internet. The ability to find out just exactly who is behind a particular website has become important. And being able to find important facts about a web domain (like revenue, traffic patterns, and speed, and contact info) can be important to you, either for business reason or just to assess the credibility of the website. Where do you go to get information like that?

I recently came across the philoneist, a wiki that investigates and tells you what and who is behind a domain name. And with out much effort I found valuable information on a couple of websites I use pretty much every day.

An entry at the philoneist will often give you a screen capture image of the site being examined. That way you know that the entry is really about the site you're interested in.