Web 2.0.11562 beta

Now selling city and state specific, mortgage-related domain names - all reasonable offers accepted! See the current list of domains here: http://www.namepros.com/domains-for-sale-auctions/267944-us-home-loans-domains-blowout.html

A followup post - http://language.pro This is a subsequent effort at unleashing a developed .pro site onto the world. Admittedly less challenging than Sushi.Pro, it is nevertheless a viable site and should add another data point to the desolate .pro webscape.

Remember my post here about title insurance for domain names? Well it’s not crazy at all to some folks. In fact this article over at DomainNameWire discusses it as if expecting it as a neccessary part of “doing business” in the business environment we currently operate in. How might they operate? Take a read a DNW and think about it for a while. Guess my “webtitle.org” name might come in handy someday after all.

A great and informative followup report by Kevin Murphy: http://texturbation.com/blog/2006/11/05/july-domain-kiting-hall-of-shame/ Same clowns in Miami doing the same old thing under the same corporate names. But the interesting thing is the legwork done to find all the names Enom may be doing business as, in an apparent attempt to fly under the radar. Good solid reporting!

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.

Proposed pricing changes in the upcoming contracts for .info .org and .biz would introduce chaos to the domain market. Here is a good article about it and here is the forum to comment on it.

Lots of folks were unhappy about the recent changes to Verisign’s contract for .com - well I can assure you the effects of that will be gradually impacting the market to the tune of 7% per year. This on the other hand creates the opportunity for dramatic changes. Registries are free to set arbitrary prices on domains they want to affect. Do you think a blog site criticizing PIR at some domain like pir-sucks-and-should-be-made-fun-of.org would be allowed to engage in free, albeit ignorant speech? No, the renewal price would simply be adjusted to, say $1 million and that would be the end of that. Not to pick on PIR too much, they’re really much better netizens than some of their competitors.

OK so I’m following Kevin Murphy’s lead again, but I’m intrigued by the nation of Cameroon’s inevitable rise to type-in traffic stardom. I’m referring to their change in policy to allow any requests for any unspecified .cm domains to resolve to a PPC page that they can make money from. I remember the outcry when Verisign tried it, but as pointed out Cameroon does not fall under any jurisdiction that has any power to make them stop. Even OpenDNS can not help here, since HTTP requests to .cm domains may in fact be legitimate. Well OK, I may never have gone to a .cm site before today, but the point remains valid.

In other news, Moniker.com was apparently bought by Kanoodle. When you look at some of the ethically-challenged registrars operating today I think they picked a winner! Elsewhere it was noted that iREIT purchased some additional portfolios consisting of some 40,000 domains including CreditReports.com and FarmLoans.com. Nice.

Kevin Murphy has this awesome expose quantifying the domain kiting phenomenon first publicly sounded by GoDaddy’s Bob Parsons.
http://texturbation.com/blog/2006/07/31/domain-kiting-hall-of-shame/

Can it really be true that the Miami company he named controls, without paying for, some 16 million domains? We all want to see the market continue to appreciate, but this artificial scarcity created by certain registrars is not a healthy subsitute for actual demand from end users.

Correction 8/5 - due to the fact that controlled domains must be deleted then grabbed again within 5 days it would seem my number too high by a factor of six. I stand by the basic point, but an accurate number is probably closer to 2 million domains. Thanks Kevin for pointing it out (see comments for details)

Is it my imagination or is the largest registrar on the planet getting increasingly hostile to end users? Recently I had a customer who had some existing domain names that had been set to auto-renew with a credit card that this customer reported as stolen. Needless to say the names now went to PPC pages owned by this registrar, and showed up listed on their auction site. Same awful behavior as before, right?

Well this customer decided to pay the company with the famous well-endowed spokeswoman $80 to re-claim one of their domains from purgatory, otherwise known as pending-delete status. But the others have remained in that status (and listed on the auction site and generating tiny PPC revenue) for two and a half months already.

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In case you haven’t noticed I’ve focused this blog increasingly on the domain name industry and related topics. Yes I’m in the business, and yes I think there’s value that can be realized by topic-oriented blogs. So from now on I’ll try to keep my non-domain name ramblings off this site. My goal then is going to be providing opinion, and if lucky a little insight.