The Domain Industry News » July 12, 2010

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(23 unread)

July 13, 2010
0:45
Seeking Advice on BumperProtectors.com
» ‎ Elliot's Blog
I would like to get your advice on how I should proceed with the development of BumperProtectors.com. I received a couple of decent offers for the domain name when I emailed companies that sell bumper protectors as well as domain investors, but nothing was significant enough to warrant selling the domain name.

One person/company inquired about the domain name last week, and after I informed him about the previous high offer, we discussed the options to build it, as the offer was higher than he would pay. We discussed creating a line of bumper protectors in China or Hong Kong and then selling them on the website. There is no real market leader that I could see, so this would be a good opportunity. Producing a $50 product for a few dollars each would yield a strong ROI after a couple of years.

The big downside with producing lines of bumper protectors is the liability issue. For whatever reason, Americans tend to be more litigious than elsewhere, and I wouldn’t want to have the liability in the event one of my $50 bumper protectors fails to protect someone’s bumper. Further, I could foresee someone forgetting to put their bumper protector away after leaving a parking spot, and in the event it flies off of the car and damages another vehicle, I could see further liability as the producer. While the liability might seem far fetched, it’s not worth the risk for such a small revenue stream in my business.

That being said, I am thinking about building a website with an Amazon store being the revenue generator. I know Amazon notoriously pays little, but if I can get the site to rank #1 as a result of unique content I have written combined with the store, it could be a nice little passive money maker.

I’ve heard about Epik and WannaDevelop but haven’t heard much in the way of results (how much people are earning from their websites). With an exact match product .com domain name, what can be expected in the way of earnings? I am not interested in spending a few hundred to build a website that makes no money!

Please let me know your thoughts on developing BumperProtectors.com.

**** 7/13 Update ***

After a very good face to face conference with Rob Monster, I’ve decided to award the project to Epik and will post updates once the site launches. This is the first time I am working with Epik and I am excited about it.

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0:37
Your Input Requested on Post-Expiration Domain Name Recovery Initial Report
» ‎ ICANN Announcements

12 July 2010

0:26
Featuring More Domaining, Development, Business Content at MarkFulton.com
» ‎ DotSauce Magazine
My personal web presence at MarkFulton.com has been around for over a decade and has gone through many different concepts and designs.

A new update is nearing completion and I’d love for you to visit.

I will now be sharing lots of short articles, app reviews, videos and other resources related to social media, domains, business, and web development at my personal blog.
Latest Posts at MarkFulton.com
New PliablePress Theme

The site is now powered by the PliablePress Chalemeon framework which allows me to manage each element of the site through an innovative and easy to use admin interface.

Not long ago, I featured complete details on PliablePress during it’s launch.

The Chameleon framework has been a pleasure to work with since updating my blog. It took me just a few minutes to set up the layout, widgets and other features. I have not had to open up the theme files at all to this point.

PliablePress is pioneering a level of WordPress customization without coding or theme editing knowledge. I am looking forward to customizing the layout and design further as I continue development.
About Me & DotSauce
If you’re curious about who I am and my history, I’ve written an updated bio.

A few months ago, I published a list of my services. I don’t regularly advertise these services, but may be available for certain things.

I’ve also included information on DotSauce Magazine and other projects.

Thanks for checking out my personal blog!

This article is from DotSauce Magazine.

Featuring More Domaining, Development, Business Content at MarkFulton.com

0:09
Brussels Fellowship Program Reached Successful Conclusion
» ‎ ICANN Announcements

12 July 2010

July 12, 2010
23:50
Is a .Net Worth 10% of .Com?
» ‎ Domain Name Wire
Answer: rarely.

There’s an old adage in the domain name industry that a .net domain name is worth 10% of the same .com. Some also like to say that other extensions (.biz, .info, etc.) are worth 1% of the .com’s value.

The problem is it’s simply not true. Or rather it’s impossible to determine. The main problem is that the sample size is too small. Believe me, I’ve tried too look through the data and figure out what these ratios are. Here are the problems I’ve run into:

1. Finding .com domain sales that have sold in other extensions and where both sales were made public is extremely challenging.

2. Comparing a .net domain sold to a domainer and .com sold to an end user (and vice-versa) is like comparing apples and oranges.

3. A .net (or .org) domain might be generally more accepted in a certain industry (such as ISPs and .net) than in others.

Having looked at many samples, I’ve found the ration to be all over the place. If one company were to have to data to solve part of this equation, it would be NameMedia. But even that would be limited to a small segment.

About the only thing I can say with certainty is that .com domains sell for more than their peers. But to put a ratio on it just isn’t feasible. You need to look for another way to express value in your non-.com domains.

© DomainNameWire.com 2010.
Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

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23:31
And the winner is…
» ‎ The Official Name.com Blog

Sky!

After almost three weeks, our unintentionally epic ping pong tournament came to a nail biting end as Sky defeated Owen in three games. Judging by the comments on our last post, most people had their money on either Matt or Owen, leaving Sky an opening to sneak in and take the title of Ping Pong King of Name.com!

Of course, now this just means some of us will be stepping up our game to get ready for the next tournament and Sky will have his work cut out for him if he wants to hang on to that trophy. ;)

You can see the results from each round here.

22:31
BlogSport.com: Is Yahoo Typosquatting Google’s Blogger Platform?
» ‎ Elliot's Blog
You’ll Never Guess Whose Making Money on This Frequently Visited Typo URL

There are plenty of times when I “fat finger” a url and end up on a website I had no intention to visit. We all do it. Oftentimes, these typo domain names are owned by typosquatters who place pay per click links on the landing page, with the hopes of making money from this traffic.

This morning, I went to visit a popular blog hosted on Google’s Blogger platform. These websites generally are formatted with a url similar to this: blogname.BlogSpot.com. When I visited the blog this morning, the page didn’t load, so I double checked that I had the correct domain name. I didn’t. Instead I had blogname.BlogSport.com.

I did a quick Whois search to see who owns the domain name, and I was very surprised to see that Yahoo owns BlogSport.com while Google owns its flagship BlogSpot.com.

You might ask yourself how this happened. It’s somewhat interesting, so I will briefly explain. Sometime between September and October 2005, BlogSport.com was acquired by the owner of Rivals.com. In June of 2007, Rivals.com was acquired by Yahoo, and they presumably acquired all of the assets of Rivals.com, which included the BlogSport.com domain name.

Today, BlogSport.com sits idle, as Yahoo isn’t monetizing or forwarding the domain name, presumably because they know that Google might take action if they did. According to Alexa, over 10 million people visit Google’s BlogSpot a month. There must be thousands of people who accidentally visit Blogsport.com a month, intending to visit a blog or website on the Blogger service.

So whose making money on this valuable typo domain name? Presumably the Internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast who monetize error landing pages “helping” web browsers who accidentally type-in an invalid domain name. It’s very kind of them to do this for us.
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22:28
Comments on the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace
» ‎ CircleID

The White House has recently released a draft of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Some of its ideas are good and some are bad. However, I fear it will be a large effort that will do little, and will pose a threat to our privacy. As I've written elsewhere, I may be willing to sacrifice some privacy to help the government protect the nation; I'm not willing to do so to help private companies track me when it's quite useless as a defense.

The fundamental premise of the proposed strategy is that our serious Internet security problems are due to lack of sufficient authentication. That is demonstrably false. The biggest problem was and is buggy code. All the authentication in the world won't stop a bad guy who goes around the authentication system, either by finding bugs exploitable before authentication is performed, finding bugs in the authentication system itself, or by hijacking your system and abusing the authenticated connection set up by the legitimate user. All of these attacks have been known for years.

The stress on authentication as a major defensive component is not new. It was in the report "Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency"; I commented on that when it was first released. My caveats about too much emphasis on authentication still stand.

What's new here is some detailed design principles. Fundamentally, the current draft is proposing a federated authentication system, with many different identity providers. But that's not new; it's been tried a number of times in the past, by such groups as the Liberty Alliance. Such efforts have been notable for their lack of success in the market. If this system is to be truly voluntary, as the draft states, why should this effort succeed? (Of course, whether or not the scheme proposed will actually be voluntary is open to some debate. The draft says the government will not "require individuals to obtain high-assurance digital credentials if they do not want to engage in high-risk online transactions with the government or otherwise". In other words, you don't have to participate, as long as you're willing to forgo things like online banking, electronic filing of tax returns, perhaps working in certain jobs, etc.)

One very good thing the draft suggests is the use of attribute credentials rather than identity credentials. If done properly, that can provide very good privacy protection. To be effective, though, the government needs mechanisms—yes, strong privacy laws and regulations—that encourage use of attributes without identity whenever possible. We need ways to discourage collection of identity information unless identity is actually needed to deliver the requested service.

There has been a lot of academic work on unlinkable credentials, such as Stefan Brands' schemes and those by Jan Camenisch and Anna Lysyanskaya. It is disappointing that the White House draft did not allude to such schemes. In fact, I'm concerned that there is no desire for true technical privacy mechanisms; the mention of forensics as a major goal worries me.

If we're going to have multiple credentials, as the draft envisions, a lot of attention needs to be paid to making these identities usable. The report notes the problem but suggests that identity providers should conduct studies on the subject, presumably to ensure that their offerings are usable. That's wrong; users deal with their own authentication agent, which in turn talks to providers without the user knowing or caring very much about how that is done. But that means that the authentication agent, in the computer, phone, or what have you, needs to be designed for usability. Of course, by centralizing authentication you've created a new, critical resource: the authentication manager. What better target for a malicious hacker....

Given all this, should we be focusing on authentication? Apart from the forensics issue (and I think that that is a major goal, though it is hardly stressed), I fear that people are looking under the lamppost for their keys. While there are certainly some challenges to doing authentication at such scale, it is a much simpler problem than buggy code. I suspect that this is being proposed because it looks doable, even though it will do little to solve the real problems and will create other risks.

Written by Steven Bellovin, Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University

Follow CircleID on Twitter

More under: Cybercrime, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation, Privacy, Security

22:24
Beware of “Free Account” Offers
» ‎ Elliot's Blog
Yesterday afternoon, I received an email from the founder of a small domain company I’ve never heard of with a seemingly great offer – a free account at the newly established company. This domain company has what seems to be a number of interesting offerings, some of which sound like they could be useful. I am going to turn it down.

It’s hard enough to maintain any privacy when blogging, but I don’t want to give away private information about my Whois searches, drop search habits…etc. The company was started by someone I don’t know nor have heard of, and it’s a service I’ve never heard of before.

I wrote about this a while back, but think it’s important enough to reiterate. Although a free account at a website with an interesting service may sound appealing, remember that the company may either be observing your individual habits or may be looking to sell data for all users.

I still remember when someone who will remain nameless (from a large company) emailed me a couple of years ago to ask me if I intentionally let a domain name drop. The name was below average, so I knew he was watching my portfolio rather than the specific name. It made me realize that there are plenty of companies who are happy to provide tools for domain investors, and I am sure that some of them are using the data, both on a personal level and aggregated, for their own enrichment.
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22:11
Does the First Amendment Forbid Spam Filtering?
» ‎ CircleID

A friend of mine wrote to ask:

The Supreme Court overturned the Jaynes conviction on First Amendment grounds, yes? I'm wondering what that could mean from the spam filtering perspective.

Spam filters, and in particular DNS blacklists are intended to prevent e-mail from being delivered. Doesn't the First Amendment make it illegal to block speech? The short answer is no, but of course it's slightly more complicated than that in practice.

If I may put on my constitutional lawyer hat for a moment (it doesn't fit very well since I'm not any kind of lawyer, but nothing I'm about to say is particularly new or controversial,) let's review what the speech part of the First Amendment does. Like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment limits the actions of the US government. Originally it just affected the Federal government, but the 14th amendment was eventually interpreted to apply it to the states as well. The key Supreme Court case was Gitlow vs. New York in 1925, an interesting case about an anarchist in New York who had been convicted of advocating overthrowing the government, and the court held in 1925 that the First Amendment precluded state laws against speech, even speech advocating overthrow of the government, short of a clear short-term threat to public safety. (Wikipedia has more details.)

The First Amendment problem in the Jaynes case was quite specific to the wording of the Virginia anti-spam law, and had nothing to do with the merits of the specific case, as I blogged at the time (blog, on CircleID).

The one other case I know of where the First Amemdment forbade state laws against Internet speech was a 2002 Pennsylvania state law that required ISPs to block addresses on a state-run blacklist of IP addresses that allegedly contained child porn. A federal juge threw it out for obvious reasons, even though child porn is unambigiously illegal, the state run blacklist was way too broad. The key fact here is that the state itself managed the blacklist.

Courts have not found the First Amendment protection absolute, even when a state is doing the blocking: In White Buffalo Ventures v. University of Texas, dating service White Buffalo sued the U of T for blocking its spam, and the court held that even though U of T is part of the Texas government, it was OK for them to block commercial spam sent to their users.

To return to the original question, as I would hope was obvious, ISPs, even very large ISPs, are not part of any government, so the First Amendment is just irrelevant. Beyond that, the Congress has provided specific protection to ISPs that block unwanted content in 47 USC 230. It was part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and although most of the CDA was voided on 1st amendment grounds, Sec. 230, which has been litigated and challenged many times, has survived all challenges. So spam blocking is legal, even if it blocks speech that a government might not be able to block.

One recent development that does make me worry is Net Neutrality. The US used to have a lot of competitive ISPs, but due to a series of ill-considered actions by the FCC, in most of the US there are only two viable broadband ISPs, one owned by the local phone company and one owned by the local cable company. Rather than undo the mistakes so there can be competitive ISPs (as the UK and other countries have done), Net Neutrality accepts the duopoly as a fact of nature, and attempts to regulate them to prevent various sorts of abuses. People with experience dealing with the FCC insist that Net Neut wouldn't affect spam filtering, but it's not hard to imagine a political or religious spammer arguing that the pair of broadband ISPs offer an essential way to communicate with people, that his spam is no worse than mail from other mailers whose mail isn't blocked (because they only send it to people who want it, or because unlike the spammer they do not send it in vast server-crushing volume), so Net Neut should require that all mail of that category be treated the same, i.e., delivered. To people familiar with the way that ISPs work, this is a silly argument, but few courts understand network technology, and it has a superficial plausibility that could be persuasive to a judge. I hope it doesn't come to that, but I'm not sanguine.

Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

Follow CircleID on Twitter

More under: Access Providers, Censorship, Email, Law, Net Neutrality, Spam

21:47
Link Roundup 2 – Domaining, Startups, WordPress, Social & More
» ‎ DotSauce Magazine

Every day on Twitter (@DotSauce), I share links to articles, resources and apps of interest to web professionals. This month I have categorized links as domaining, small business, startups & entrepreneurship, social networking, web development, design, and WordPress.

These links were selected from June 12th to July 12th 2010.
Domain Names
Mahalo uses keyword domains to drive traffic [bit.ly]

Worldwide domain registrations double over past 4 years [bit.ly]

How To Automate End User Domain Sales Marketing [bit.ly]

Domain Name Dispute and Arbitration Resources [bit.ly]

Right Brain Domaining [bit.ly]

Job.com: 50% Of Visitors Come From Direct Navigation [bit.ly]

How Domaining is Like Collecting Baseball Cards [bit.ly]

Premium TLDs: Not All Extensions Created Equal [dotsauce.com]
Small Business
Self hosted options voted best to set up shop online [bit.ly]

A look at the freemium business model [bit.ly]

How The World Spends Time Online [bit.ly]

10 Ways To Be Your Own Boss [bit.ly]

How to Bootstrap a Business [bit.ly]

9 Expert SEO Tips for Small Businesses [bit.ly]

Everything I learned in business came from 3 charts [bit.ly]
Startups & Entrepreneurship
76 Powerful Thoughts from Paul Graham [bit.ly]

Everything You Need To Know About Startup Ecosystem [bit.ly]

How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen [bit.ly]

10 Tips for Startups on Naming Your Company [bit.ly]

Competition Is Overrated [bit.ly]

Why many successful entrepreneurs came out of PayPal [bit.ly]

BBC Special: Start-Up Stories [bit.ly]
Social Networking
15 Awesome Social Media Infographics [bit.ly]

Twitter T.CO Domain As Official Link Shortener [bit.ly]

How Much Is a Facebook Fan Really Worth? [bit.ly]

Measure Social Media and Its Impact on Your Brand [bit.ly]

Is Social a Source for B2B Leads? [bit.ly]

Jive Software Wants to Be Facebook for the Enterprise [bit.ly]

Pick&Zip – Download All Your Photos from Facebook [bit.ly]

MySpace will attempt a comeback later this year [bit.ly]

2/3 of Web Users to Visit Social Networks by 2014 [bit.ly]

6 Social Media Mistakes And How to Fix Them [bit.ly]
Web Design
Get a head start: Designing Websites for Google TV [bit.ly]

Fancy Sliding Form with jQuery [bit.ly]

10 Beautiful Minimalist Icon Sets [bit.ly]

Will LESS Make CSS Obsolete? [bit.ly]

50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers [bit.ly]
Web Development
Information Architecture: Enhancing User Experience [bit.ly]

Spice Up Your Website With jQuery Goodness [bit.ly]

30 Pro jQuery Tips, Tricks and Strategies [bit.ly]

Firefox Reveals Websites’ Best Friend and Worst Enemy [bit.ly]

The Right Keyword Analysis For Your Website [bit.ly]

The Right Keyword Analysis For Your Website (Part-2) [bit.ly]

The State of HTML5 Apps [bit.ly]

29 Worst Practices: SEO Checklist [selnd.com]

Beginner’s Guide to SEO from SEOmoz [bit.ly]

Collection of website user experience misconceptions [bit.ly]

The 10 HTML Tags Beginners Aren’t Using [bit.ly]

HTML5 Rocks!: A resource for web developers by Google [bit.ly]

Link Building With The Experts [bit.ly]
WordPress
WordPress Plugin – Ozh Drop Down Admin Menu [bit.ly]

WP 3.0 Easy Post Types Plugin [bit.ly]

WordPress Plugin – Compresses files – WP Minify [bit.ly]

The Ultimate WordPress Shopping/Ecommerce Toolbox [bit.ly]

Essential Plugins for WordPress 3.0 [bit.ly]

Build Your Own Website Network With WordPress 3.0 [bit.ly]

10 Useful WordPress Security Tweaks [bit.ly]

Email Commenters WordPress Plugin [bit.ly]

WP Facebook Plugin [bit.ly]

Top 15 Premium WordPress Plugins [bit.ly]
Random & Useful
Best Chrome Addons for Power Blogging [bit.ly]

Google Chrome Gets Extension Sync [bit.ly]

Encrypt the web – HTTPS Everywhere for Firefox [bit.ly]

Everything you need to know about the internet [bit.ly]

Bounce – Fun, easy way to share ideas on a website [bit.ly]

67 trendy innovations – Innovation Insanity: [bit.ly]

How People Are Using the iPad [bit.ly]

I hope you found a lot of these resources useful.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter for all the latest updates. You may also want to bookmark this post for quick access and feel free to share these resources with your social following.

This article is from DotSauce Magazine.

Link Roundup 2 – Domaining, Startups, WordPress, Social & More

21:19
. CO Internet extends the Phase 3 launch of the. Co second level
» ‎ Domisfera

The manager of the domains. Co of Colombia . CO SAS Internet has expanded the Phase Three (Commercial Interest) of the process of opening the registry of. co second level.

Initially this phase started on June 21 and ended on 13 July. Now due to the large demand created, is extended until 16 July.

During this period, any interested party may apply for a domain. However, the record price at this stage is, for a limited time, higher than the normal registration price.

The domains can be requested through the accredited registrars , which include InterNetX . The average price of these domains has been between $ 250 and $ 300, depending on the registrar. In the case of more than one application for the same domain, an auction will be held between interested parties (There were about 1000 requests matching ).

To date there have been over 26,000 requests for domains. Co second level (11,000 of which are trademarks ) and expect a few thousand more before the start of the stage of registration free, July 20, 2010 .

In September 2009 , the number of domains of the ccTLD in Colombia was 26 968, being the eighth ccTLDs in Latin America.

19:42
ELLIOT SILVER REVEALS HIS INSPIRING MOMENT TO START DOMAINING
» ‎ SUCCESSCLICK.COM

Whoa! I came across a new video sweeping the country, and I realized that this video was actually shot and narrated by Elliot Silver, famous domain investor and blogger. It was obvious that Elliot (El-Silver) had been shrooming that day and took a hike up his back acres to spend some time to “clean his soul” from his involvement at AIG. *El is under suspicion by this author of being the mastermind of all economic disasters in the country, perpetrated only for his financial gain. He is actually a multi-billionaire toying with domainers and is the “evil” twin of Dick Cheney).

A copy of this video, just a few minutes long, was sent to me by my top private eye, Frankie Bologna. It is clear that El is using the dark arts of weather control, magical potions, and mind-enhancing substances to be the master domainer he seems to be.

Beware of “illusions” created by wizards… said my 101 year old great grandma who drinks at least a fifth of scotch a day (along with a cigar, Cubans supplied by a doom-like character, Mikey-C).

Here’s the video. I recommend that you WATCH IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH. It shows the range of power that El can use to control our emotions to actually believe anything and everything he says! We should believe him, but still… his techniques are psychedelic, baby!

Elliot Gets Inspired (yeah, click it!)

YOU MUST WATCH THE WHOLE VIDEO TO GET THE FULL AFFECT!

Then, sign up for my new email newsletter so I can give you the same inspiration…
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19:12
Local.com Gives Octane360 More Octane
» ‎ Domain Name Wire
[Editor's note: Last Friday I interviewed Local.com CEO Heath Clarke and Senior VP of Corporate Development Peter Hutto about their company's acquisition of Octane360. In doing research, I realized the first article I ever wrote on DNW -- March 9, 2005 -- was about their company's purchase of the Local.com domain name for $700,000. That was 3,575 posts ago.]

I’ve long thought Octane360′s business model was one of the most innovative monetization strategies for domain owners. The only challenge was that, as a startup, it was going to take time for its model to be fully realized. It needed a bit more octane.

That all changed July 1 when publicly-traded Local.com snapped up the company, drastically accelerating its strategy.

“We bring the scale component,” said Local.com Chairman and CEO Heath Clarke in an interview with Domain Name Wire. “We offer Octane360 access to capital and we can do ad sales at scale.”

Indeed, Local.com has a market cap over $100 million and touches 20-25 million users a month, both on its flagship Local.com site and through syndication deals. On the same day it announced the acquisition it also announced a $30 million line-of-credit from Silicon Valley Bank.

In return, Octane360 gives Local.com the opportunity to expand beyond its main site and offer new products.

Peter Hutto, Senior VP of Corporate Development, explained that the acquisition “Takes our footprint and expands from Local.com into potentially hundreds of thousands of sites. It gives us an expanded product set to offer to small businesses.”

Local.com has a solid sales machine, but now has a new and innovative product to sell. “We lack the right suite of products to really light that up,” said Clarke. “We were selling a product that has been in the market for 15 years. This product is new for our audience.”

It will also allow the company to go upmarket by offering a suite of products from Octane360 that can sell for $1,000 or more. That’s a major difference from selling a $50 product, as it opens up an entirely new sales channel.

“This allows us to have a product at a price point that a feet-on-the-street sales force can sell and make money,” explained Hutto. “That opens up channel sales partners. We have all those partners already; what we don’t have is a product to sell through them.”

Until now.

Not only is having a product to sell through outside sales representatives a first for Local.com, but it’s also a first for domainers.

“This is entirely new for the domain industry, period,” said Clarke.

Octane360 clients should start to see increased revenue in the near term. Local.com’s pay-per-click search listings have already been integrated onto Octane domains. Soon you’ll see the effect of sales from more call centers and through additional channels. For now, the company still works mostly with domain owners with 500 or more geo category domain names.

© DomainNameWire.com 2010.
Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

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17:48
AFNIC Launch Public Consultation on Opening .FR to EU
» ‎ I Squatted Your EU

AFNIC, which runs the .fr cctld, has opened a public consultation on the future of .fr from now until September 11th 2010.

The consultation is in the form of a questionnaire covering various aspects of .fr domain name policy on the registration process and how this might be changed to deal with an opening up to all European Union residents.

Under the current proposed policy, for example, they will still require an admin contact with an address in France.

Full details of the consultation - including the editable PDF for the questionnaire are available on the AFNIC site

16:20
Almost 4 million .nl domain names registered so far
» ‎ DomainNews

SIDN,the official management body for .nl will pass another milestone when it will reach 4 million .nl domain name registrations.

16:16
WP-Themes.de
» ‎ Domain Smalltalk

Das Angebot an Themes für die beliebte WordPress Blogsoftware ist in den letzten Jahren geradezu explodiert. Es gibt unzählige kostenlose wie auch Kostenpflichtige WP Themes im World Wide Web und sie sind ebenfalls auf unzähligen Webpräsenzen verteilt. Um so wichtiger ist es solche WP Themes unter einer guten beschreibbaren Domain zu präsentieren. Und welche Domain beschreibt…

11:10
A DeLorean, 88 Miles an Hour and a Fully-Charged Flux Capacitor…
» ‎ CircleID

For a brief moment last week, I thought my days spent dreaming of hover-boards, flying cars and Biff's elusive Sports Almanac were finally over. From reports circulating online, we had finally reached "Back to the Future Day".

Those movie buffs out there will know exactly what I'm referring to. It's the day Doc Brown and Marty McFly pumped their DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour and flew into the future in search of, well I'm not quite sure what… But it was cool whatever it was.

Being a guy that has long held a vision of cruising down to my local store decked out in a fluoro hat, self-drying bomber jacket and electric Nikes, it quickly came to me that Back to the Future day was, in fact, October 21, 2015. Great Scott! They had me going there for a second...

But it got me thinking. What would the Domain Name world look like if that crazy cat Doc Brown swung past in his DeLorean, with a fully-charged flux capacitor and a return ticket to October 21st 2015?

Well, you'll never believe it...I put in a call to into an old Science camp buddy and he was able to get onto the Doc, pull him out of retirement and convince him to fire up the DeLorean, one last time, all for the greater good of the Domain Name industry.

Although I've kept a little secret or two to myself (like next week's lottery numbers), below is a brief insight into what 2015 looks like for the industry:

• The new gTLD program has well and truly taken hold. Following the approval of the final version of the Applicant Guidebook at ICANN 39 in Cartegena, the 45 day registration period in early 2011 drew a massive 865 applications, including a range of generics, corporate, brand and geographic TLDs.

• 526 of those applications made it through to approval and launched. The auction process for generic TLDs created a word-wide buzz with the highlight being the 12 parties that entered into a bidding war for .web, which achieved a whopping $53 million price tag. The total revenue from the auction process was a staggering $437 million. Though much of this windfall was used to support a range of development initiatives around the globe, eyebrows were certainly raised when ICANN decided to purchase their own Airbus A380 (affectionately known as The Flying Starfish). This was deemed to be a cheaper option than sending their 430 staff to each meeting on commercial airlines, and it also solved the problem that it was becoming increasingly difficult to get to ICANN meetings as ICANN themselves had booked out all the flights. This problem came to a head at the October 2012 meeting in Vladivostok, where staff outnumbered participants.

• The kerfuffle about vertical integration is long forgotten. The Board finally lost patience with the GNSO in late 2010 and decided to allow full, unfettered integration between Registries and Registrars. Dozens of registries are creating and retailing generic TLDs with a range of innovative business models and with no detectable harm whatsoever to consumers. On the contrary, consumers and businesses now have a whole world of choice about how they construct their online identities. The massive increase in contracted parties however rendered the GNSO even more unwieldy and dysfunctional, and has led to yet another restructuring, which is taking some years to work out.

• In 2015 the definition of success for a namespace is no longer based purely on registration numbers. Registries have adopted "left of the dot" thinking to create portals that bind tribes of people together from across the globe. A focus on utility seems to have won over the more simplistic measure of volume.

• Those organisations that chose to utilise the full potential of 'dot Brand' TLDs and have built a strategy for implementation are reaping the benefits of leading the pack. Many industry watchers were aghast to discover that Facebook had chosen to pass up the opportunity, especially when they saw MySpace reinvent itself under the .myspace TLD, attracting more than 7 million registrants in their first 18 months of operation.

• The search market is no longer as all-powerful as it is back in 2010. The creation of 'dot Brand' TLDS has finally pulled users away from the clutter of search engines and back to direct navigation in its traditional and intuitive form. Marketers around the world are enjoying unheard of rates of recall and message efficiency.

• .xxx is still yet to see the light of day, despite being approved by the ICANN Board in late 2010, much to the delight of most of the adult entertainment industry. Meanwhile .sex and .porn are proving successful, even though a number of governments have blocked access to them.

• Linguistic communities across the world have followed the example of .cat and now hold a firm slice of the internet, while IDN TLDs have also been particularly successful. The Chinese language versions of .com and .org are both now well-established, with over 40 million registered names between them, happily co-existing in both Simplified and Traditional scripts. The .china IDN ccTLDs have helped to consign .cn to now almost complete irrelevancy.

• Also on the IDN front, the new IDNA2012 protocol included a number of new scripts and characters including Wing Dings and Vulcan that have caused great excitement in certain sectors of the 'technical' community. The inclusion of a number of additional punctuation marks as valid IDN characters also saw Yahoo! finally secure their domain name, including the exclamation mark.

• Many smaller and especially newer ccTLDs have struggled to maintain their relevance in the new Domain Name landscape having missed the window of opportunity to establish themselves before the release of the new gTLDs.

• Interestingly, the future of .tv is now in question, with the last inhabitants of the islands of Tuvalu moving to their new homes in Australia and New Zealand in late 2014 as the rising ocean engulfs the remaining dry land, and the United Nations considers what to do with a country that physically no longer exists.

But what of .com, I hear you ask? Well it's still around and going strong, but has seen a steady decline in new registration volumes since the new gTLD program launched. A study released in late 2014 highlighted an increasing percentage of .com domains that were simply redirecting to new gTLDs.

And finally, AusRegistry International has continued to create the benchmark for ICANN meeting marketing with their wildly successful campaign involving personalised 'TLD hover-boards', unveiled at the March 2015 conference in Nuuk, Greenland.

So there we are, a little insight into what our world will look like when the real Back to the Future Day swings around in a little over 5 years time. While there was no reference to flying cars or talking microwaves, my time with the Doc opened my eyes to the exciting future of an industry that is driving innovation in the world's largest media channel. I for one can't wait to be a part of it.

Oh and according to page 286 of Gray's Sports Almanac, 2010 is the year of Cadel Evans who finally holds on through the mountain stages to claim his first Tour de France.

Written by Tony Kirsch, Senior Manager - International Business Development, AusRegistry International

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More under: DNS, Domain Names, Domain Registries, ICANN, Multilinguism, Top-Level Domains
10:36
One Billion Internet Users
» ‎ CircleID

Last week ICANN took another very significant step forward in the expansion of the internet by approving the delegation of a number of Chinese script IDN ccTLDs.

Although we have all heard statements that portray the introduction of IDN ccTLDs as being perhaps the single most important factor in the achievement of ICANN's "One World, One Internet" vision, we should take a moment to appreciate the true significance of this latest round of IDN ccTLD approvals.

There are over one billion people in the Chinese language community, an audience that until last week required some knowledge of the Latin alphabet to navigate the internet using the Domain Name System. Even with a basic grasp of the Latin alphabet, the painful usability issue of having to switch between Chinese and Latin keyboard layouts has been a significant barrier for many end-users.

The significance of introducing IDN ccTLDs into the Chinese language context is not just about improving accessibility, however.

We should spare a thought for the marketing managers who are tasked with communicating to an audience of over a billion Chinese consumers.

At first glance it seems like a brilliant opportunity, however it becomes a little tougher once you consider the following…

You're running a traditional advertising campaign. You have the right brand, you've developed the right message and you finally have people reading and wanting to respond to your ads. All that's required from here is the ability to drive website traffic directly from your advertisement, but you only have a Latin-based Domain Name at your disposal.

What do you think your chances of success are if your audience is unable to understand what your Latin-based domain name is?

Very little, next to none, even. In this context, the big bad (and expensive) world of search engine marketing is your only fall-back.

While I don't profess to be fluent in Chinese, the advertisement I have included above is an example of how difficult it currently is for Chinese marketers to generate effective direct response advertising and achieve messaging efficiency.

The latest round of IDN ccTLD delegations will change all of this and change it in a big way.

Once Chinese IDN ccTLDs are introduced, more consumers will be drawn to the internet as language and usability barriers are removed. Internet penetration should accelerate and marketers will find themselves operating in a world where the doors of direct-response marketing will be flung wide open. Message recall and direct, browser-based website traffic should improve dramatically and Chinese marketers will finally be able to include a website as the primary call to action with a high level of confidence that it will succeed.

When you consider these points in the context of the sheer size of the Chinese language market, it's easy to see the importance of this latest list of delegations to the overall success of the IDN Fast Track program.

Both China and Taiwan have had Simplified and Traditional script versions of their IDN ccTLDs approved. These are to be managed as 'Synchronised IDN ccTLDs', which means that both versions should resolve to the same address.

Hong Kong is spared this additional level of complexity by the simple fact that 'Hong Kong' is written using the same characters in both script versions. Domain names registered under .香港 will be issued both Traditional and Simplified variants, however.

The Chinese IDN ccTLDs that will soon be delegated into the root are therefore as follows:

China
.中国 (Simplified)
.中國 (Traditional)

Hong Kong
.香港

Taiwan
.台湾 (Simplified)
.台灣 (Traditional)

Recently, IANA also announced that three further IDN ccTLDs have passed the String Evaluation Phase. These are:

سوريا. (.syria—Arabic)

.新加坡 (.singapore—Chinese)
.சிங்கப்பூர் (.singapore—Tamil)

We would like to congratulate CNNIC, TWNIC and HKIRC on having their Chinese IDN ccTLD delegations approved. We would also like to congratulate SGNIC and Syria's National Agency for Network Services on passing the String Evaluation Phase.

AusRegistry International is a strong supporter of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Program and is a leading provider of IDN-enabled Domain Name Registry Software and Consulting Services to ccTLD Managers. We are currently supporting the launch of the Arabic script امارات. (.emarat) IDN ccTLD for the United Arab Emirates as well as the قطر. (.qatar) Arabic script IDN ccTLD for Qatar.

Written by Jon Lawrence, Business Development Consultant, AusRegistry International

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More under: DNS, Domain Names, Domain Registries, ICANN, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation, Top-Level Domains

10:01
SnapNames Shopping and eCommerce Auction starts tomorrow
» ‎ DomainNews

SnapNames is hosting this month a Shopping & eCommerce domain name auction .The auction starts tomorrow,at 09:00 AM PDT and will start closing at 12:15 PM PDT on 20 July,2010 .
10:00
Google fights for Googledoc.com domain name
» ‎ DomainNews

Google,the American public corporation has recently submitted a complaint to the National Arbitration Forum,claiming rights over Googledoc.com domain name .

6:22
About 1,500 .Co Sunrise Applications Denied; Now Available in Landrush
» ‎ Domain Name Wire
Denied sunrise applications and additional releases from .co registry now available.

[Update: the full list has been published by some registrars this morning.] About 1,500 applications for .co domain names through the trademark sunrise process have been denied, and the domain names are now available for registration through Landrush. If any of them are not claimed during the Landrush period, they will be available for pre-registration before July 20 and general registration beginning July 20. Some names that were previously reserved for .co’s Founders Program and for other reasons have also been released.

Although the full list of denied sunrise domain names has not been published, here are some of the domain names Domain Name Wire has learned have become available in Landrush thanks to denied sunrise applications or other reasons:

Ace.co
Alabama.co
Balloon.co
Calorie.co
Counseling.co
Crossword.co
Darts.co
Gumballs.co
Museums.co
Private.co
Tourist.co
Vote.co

If you tried to apply for a domain during Landrush and found it unavailable, it might be worth trying again. The deadline is July 16.

The better domains will most likely be registered through the Landrush process. You can view DNW’s guide to landrush and application pricing here. Pre-registration pricing is available here.

© DomainNameWire.com 2010.
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5:00
.Co Domains Released for Registration
» ‎ Domainmonster.com

New York, 12th July 2010 – .Co Internet, the .Co Domain Name Registry, today released 1500 domain names that failed t...

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