I am Steve Hoare, aka Dooza, from High Wycombe… half way between London and Oxford on the M40. If you have come here looking for porn you have come to the wrong place. Why did I think you did? Well, since I started using Dooza as my nickname over 10 years ago, my online presence has been tarnished by a giant porn site who decided to call themself Dooza.
So, where did Dooza come from?
When I was at Derby University during 93/95 I was in a small band, we called ourselves Dooza. I was doing an HND in Music Technology, and was making my own music. When I left Uni the band split up and I was allowed to keep using the name.
In 1999/2000 I used the services of Freenetnames to get myself my first domain name, I chose www.dooza.co.uk. Part of this free service was to use there dial up to get your email and ftp to your domain. You can see a history of the domain at the Way Back Machine.
In 2001 I moved to a house where we had cable installed, and I stopped being able to dial into Freenetname to access my domain. They wanted £95 to release the domain, even though I had the domain registration certificate (which I still have). I intended to let the domain expire and then buy it back, but Freenetname had registered it for much longer than anticipated. When I was orignally looking at domains I used uk2.net to search for variations, they were all available in 1999/2000 but when I was looking again in 2001 they were all taken, apart from one, www.dooza.tv. All these domains that were taken had nothing on them, but were owned by the same company.
For several years if you searched for Dooza you only found references to the sites I designed and the parties I helped with. It was easy to find me, I was unique.
Since then www.dooza.co.uk was released and bought up by the same companies, and is now part of a huge network of porn sites. If you search for Dooza you find mainly porn, but I am still on the first page, but its well hidden. I don’t know what to do about it apart from laugh, as what else can I do? I would be interested to hear from the owners, I have always wondered why they chose Dooza for there sites. What does it mean to them?
Update: Its gone! No more porn associated with Dooza, now I just have to contend with other people called Dooza.
Well well well, all of a sudden dooza.co.uk is available again, so I jumped at the chance to get it back under my control.