Web 2.0.11562 beta

OK you mention footwear companies and I think of giant marketing machines with sweatshops. But Adidas has gone and made such a cool product. Not content with lame old-fashioned advertising, they created a counterpart to a real product that is tailor made for second life. Their a3 Microride shoe actually gives you lots of bouncing ability in SL. Now that’s smart. If beer companies offered the same kinds of products the girls around you would actually start to look better as you consumed virtual beer in SL.

Great example of a smart registry in action! Many sequences of digts were reserved by Neustar (the .US registry), including 5-digit domains, 5-digits-dash-4-digits (zip + 4) and all possible US 10-digit phone numbers. To see the complete list of reserved domains see this zipped doc.
They are in a stronger position than Marchex with their incomplete collection of zipcode .coms and .nets. But Marchex has a head start with myzip.com which they plan to use as their portal.
Are these guys smart or what? The next competitor - .TEL extension, who aim to bring a souped-up version of the same basic funtionality to a worldwide userbase.

Here is my letter sent to my local congressmen and senators earlier today, in reaction to ICANN moving up their next meeting date when this issue will presumably be discussed. Not that I think the US congress should seek legislative solutions to force saneness on the part of ICANN, but the mere threat of action to pressure the commerce Dept. should help to compel ICANN to include language that people are more comfortable with. The main goal should be to find reasonable ways to allow registries to profit without putting the users if the system at such a high level of risk.

Read on to see the text of the letters. More to the point, if you agree please write to your congresspersons. You can do so at http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issues/alert/?alertid=9002726&content_dir=ua_congressorg

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Say what you will about the shortcomings of ICANN, and the United States’ continued oversight function, but let me be the first to say that there is not a viable alternative. The United Nations is demonstrably incompetent when it comes to any sort of governance, technical or not. I think that’s the main obstacle to a transition to another governance model - the distinct lack of any credible choices.

ICANN has launched its new Registry Request Service stocked with industry insiders who seem poised to deal with new and sometimes innovative requests from all comers. Registries in particular will find exciting ways to drive increased registration, so one easy prediction influenced by a recent Verisign report: the number of registered domains will never again be reported to be less than 100 million!