The Wall Street Journal notes that the business.com domain could fetch $300 million for owners Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton, on a $7.5 million initial investment. Meanwhile, everyone is poo-pooing the thing.

Assuming what the Journal says is true and the site is pulling in roughly $15 million in EBITDA…

Techdirt says “At this point, there’s a little more here than just a domain name, but it’s still hard to tell how much of a business business.com actually is.”

Meanwhile, a Wired reporter didn’t even seem to have read the story, when creating the title for criticism “Domain Madness: Business.com For $400 Million?“.

The list of goes on, but the point is clear: if you don’t have fifty AJAX “widgets” scattered across the site a designer charged you $250,000 to create and/or just announced a “lucrative business development relationship” with someone who does (even if they’ve blown through tens of millions in VC money and still don’t have a dime of revenue to show for it), your business is not worth two-cents. I will say that 20X EBITDA is a bit dear for a company growing 50% per annum, but still the context of the naysaying doesn’t get near this point.

You don’t have to look far to find simplicity hitting homers - Craigslist…Plenty of Fish; and if you still don’t get the idea, ask Kevin Ham out for lunch.

Beauty is skin deep, and elegance eventually trips on the runway. Meanwhile, ugly seems to be going to the bank.

UPDATE: Mike Arrington chimes in with a more credible tone, and a snack for thought.

This website will eventually contain select contents of the previous Spamroll.com and Thoughtmarket.com blogs (the moment I find someone who really knows how to import the stuff), as well as all future goings on.

Meanwhile, I’ve chosen a sparse design for which tweaking will be kept to a minimum. The reasoning - many sites have more in the way of graphics, widgets and what-have-you for most people’s tastes (and dialup connections), yet the virtual gadgets continue to proliferate at an alarming rate. My question is…does anyone feel the glitter DOESN’T distract them from the content at hand? Personally, I can’t read half a paragraph of most blog entries without being tempted to click on some link, picture, or flashing graphic - I almost never finish consuming the content. But I guess it’s all good, if you own one of the companies making the bling.

Inspiration for the approach comes from the ideas of Edward Tufte, styling examples from plaintext.org, and the timeless wonder The Elements of Style.

UPDATE: One caveat - I reserve the right to throw some photos up.