Wendy: I like the widgets, though I wish I could rip them apart and create a non-widgety presentation type. I haven’t seen them out in the world on any pages yet, but will now keep my eye out for them. I’m going to take a closer look at all of Amazon’s services as well. Maybe there’s something there that can be part of the soup.

Eliot: Thanks for the Mahalo SERP suggestion, and the results remix idea. Might be a good use case for Mahalo’s hand-crafted approach. I think some of this may come down to aesthetics in addition to functionality. I need to start doing some experimenting.

I’ve been mucking around with the idea of programming a widget that would let you post your own list of things you recommend while at the same time, earning affiliate commissions for doing so. In the meantime, Amazon and a couple of other ventures (Lemonade, Favorite Thingz) have recently launched these very same widgets. If only I knew how to program asp .net sooner…!

Check out http://widgets.amazon.com. You can sign up for an affiliate ID for free. At the very least, it might earn you some pizza money while those domains are languishing in the parking lot :)

If there are monetized elements on the page, I think they’d have to be highly editorial. For example, if there were a way the domain owner could easily make it a page of actual recommendations from a list of things they’ve bought, that could be one way to go. Or it could pull from the list and just display a single item really nicely each time it comes up. I just bought a wallet from Etsy that I really like, and wouldn’t mind showing that off, or the Field Notes notebooks I’ve been using. I need to do some research on what some of the sites I buy stuff from offer in terms of making that information easy to grab.

I know the less it relies on pre-existing automation the more of a hassle it becomes, so perhaps some kind of simple hack makes sense here rather than putting a whole lot of energy into building something elaborate.

How about you — if you’re starting from scratch, what should be on a page like this in your mind?

People would be disappointed they didn’t get what they wanted, but they’d at least get some useful links, unlike the two parked page examples you had above.

You could always sprinkle in Adsense if you’d like (affiliate links would make you just as obnoxious as those parked pages)

Another possibility:
Just show the top three results from Google, eBay, Amazon, YouTube, and Flickr. Make a generic page that just required you to plug in a search term to seed the results. You could even show that search term to the visitor and let them supply their own term if they’re looking for something else. You could display of recent search keywords since subsequent visitors might be looking for the same thing.

Any of those are very doable and would help you personalize it. From the standpoint of monetizing it we can also throw in affiliate links in the category of your choosing. (Like Henry Ford, as long as your choices credit cards, right now). we also could include your own AdSense ads too.

if you are interested in this type of a domain holding page, it is something that we could develop fairly easily through siteMighty. What do you think?

Chris