Monthly Archives: August 2008

Mon 25th August 2008
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Florida Housing: Sales Up, Prices Down - According to the Florida Association of Realtors, for the first time in two years, single-family home sales rose last month  . However, median sales prices continued to decline. Ft Lauderdale reported 581 existing home sales, down slightly from last year’s 559 sales. The median sales price fell 19%, to $303,600 from $373,700. Miami saw just 392 existing homes sold in July, a 22 percent drop from 505 home sales during the same period last year. The median sale prices declined to $322,700 from $377,400. West ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Google to Provide Verizon Search? - The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Verizon Communications Inc. is nearing an agreement with Google Inc. on a wide-ranging partnership, including providing Verizon mobile search results. The deal under discussion, which would make Google the default search provider on Verizon devices and give Verizon a share of ad revenue, According to the Journal the deal isn’t yet final and negotiations are still under way on key issues, such as Google’s desire to save information from user cellphone ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Jamaica Becomes Second Country to Protect Olympic Winners Domains. - Last week China announced that they would block attempted .cn registrations of Olympic winners. Today the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office, which is the government copyright body, announced that they would attempt to block the sales of .com domains of Olympic winning Jamaican Athletes. The athletes include Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell and Veronica Campbell-Brown. The domain UsainBolt.com was at auction at Sedo.com but is now shown as canceled. The nest stop for these domains maybe ebay or afternic, ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
GoldKey Gets Phished - Domain parking service hit with phishing attack. Domain parking service GoldKey.com was hit with a phishing attack earlier today. The perpetrator apparently used the typo domain goldKay.com to capture customer logins. The domain GoldKay.com was registered at NameCheap yesterday and is no longer resolving to a web site. GoldKey is one of three domain parking services owned by Name Media. Its other parking services include Active Audience and SmartName. This isn’t ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Sedo Revamps Offers Page and Process - Domain aftermarket adds new features for buying and selling domain names. Domain name aftermarket Sedo has revamped how domain details pages look to personalize transactions. The changes add information about the seller of the domain, including how much activity the seller has participated in as a seller on Sedo. This is helpful for domain buyers tired of placing offers and not receiving a response. Once negotiations begin between seller and buyer, the seller will ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
.Org Domain Hit 7 Million Registrations - Public Interest Registry reports milestone. Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry that manages the .org top level domain, announced today that there are now 7 million .org domain names registered. Since management of the registry was assumed by Public Interest Registry in 2003, .org registrations have increased more than 250%, the registry reports As part of the announcement, PIR got Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to comment about .org: “We can’t imagine ... read more ...
Sun 24th August 2008
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
.ME Update: Over 1,100 domains sole for $100 or More - The .Me auctions are starting to wind down. At this point there have been 1143 domains sold for $100 or more in the auction period: The total sales from these 1143 domain is just under $2 Million. For a complete list of all the 1143 domains click here: (excel file) me-over-100 As for current auctions here are the only ones over $1,000: sync.me          $40,005 verify.me        $12,000 star.me           $6,015 massage.me   $5,705 sex4.me         $4,175 carparts.me    ... read more ...
Sat 23rd August 2008
Written by The Domains in EN
We Don’t Get it that They “Don’t Get It” - Over the last few years many discussions and  domain show panels have been held on why non-domainers, “don’t get it” when it comes to the value of domains. Last week Search Engine Strategies  (SES) show and woeful domain auction demonstrate the point. Let’s look at the numbers.  TRAFFIC show attendees, 400-500.  SES attendees 6,000. Out of the 6,000 people at the SES show there were only 150 people in attendance at the start of the domain auction.  This represents only 2-1/2% of the ... read more ...
Fri 22nd August 2008
Written by The Domains in EN
Google to Update Smart Pricing On The Fly: Domainers Money to Drop Again? - Google plans to update its mechanism for ad quality scoring, known as smart pricing, on the fly or immediately upon each search. Google announced on its its AdWords blog Thursday, that ad quality will be judged at the time a user searches . Google will begin testing changes with a small set of users “within the next day or two,” before deploying the changes for everyone. “We are replacing our static per-keyword Quality Scores with a system that will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
I.O.U.S.A: The US is Doomed Unless Drastic Steps Are Taken: Are They Right? - I went to the opening night of the film I.O.U.S.A. Here’s my thoughts and observations. First from just a movies going experience the film is fair. Not anywhere near as entertaining as a Michael Moore Documentary or a film like “Supersize Me” and not even up to Al Gore movie. The film is pretty dry, heavy on numbers and content and not very exciting. The makers point is pretty simple.  The US now has  a deficit of 9.5 trillion dollars. A trillion dollars is 1,000 billion dollars, so it’s ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
People You Don’t Have to Wait Until Your Domain Expires to Renew Your Domain - This post is for the non-domainers who read the blog. A recent report by  Nominet, which is the national registry for .uk domain names, showed that 14 per cent of companies don’t renew their domain name until the day after renewal is due. I read stories every week of companies who complain about losing their domain because they didn’t get the renewal notice, their contact info wasn’t correct, etc. etc. So for those folks here are some simply rules that all us domainers know. You don’t have ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
The United States is Beat By a Country of Niue - The tiny south pacific island of Niue has beaten the “greatest nation on earth” the US. Don’t worry,  not in the Olympic games. Niue became the first nation in the world to issue laptop computers to all its children. Every primary and secondary school student was this week given a rugged ” relatively waterproof and breakproof” little green laptop, which has a wireless connection to the Internet as part of the One Laptop Per Child. The computers have been specially designed by a U.S.-based ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
GoDaddy Files Patents for “Hosting Connection” - Recent patent filings appear to cover aspects of GoDaddy’s Hosting Connection service. A series of four related patent applications filed by GoDaddy and published by the USPTO yesterday appear to cover GoDaddy’s “Hosting Connection” service that lets customers purchase add-on applications for their web hosting accounts. The patents were filed in February 2007. The patent applications, including “Web hosting community”, “Community web site for creating ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Big Companies Go After .Mobi Domain Names - This stems from this commentary and many you have posted in the past. No matter what the occasion, no matter what little ray of good news there is about .mobi, you have to place your own biased slant on .mobi. It is clear, very clear, that you don’t like it, have no use for it, and don’t care to hear about about it. Yet, it is good for the confrontations and good for the controversies it stirs up therefore good for the rankings. Previously, I also had to ask or remind you to look ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
How to Edit Domain Submissions to TrafficZ Auction - If you submitted domains to the TrafficZ/Aftermarket.com auction at TRAFFIC, here’s how to add descriptions to each of your domains. If you’ve already submitted domains to the TrafficZ auction taking place at TRAFFIC next month in New York, you should consider adding descriptions to each of your domains. (If you haven’t yet submitted domains, here’s a quick tutorial.) The process for adding descriptions is fairly simple. Log in to your auction manager at ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Dying Business #273: Phone Book Covers - Here’s one more business the internet will kill off. I got an interesting large envelope in the mail this week. On the outside of the envelope was a stamp “IMPORTANT”. I opened the envelope to find a thin sheet of plastic with ads on it. I was confused as to what this was, until I read the accompanying letter. “Enclosed is your complimentary phone book cover!” Wow, it’s not every day that you get something for free. Especially something as useless ... read more ...
Thu 21st August 2008
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
ComScore: Baidu 3rd largest Search Engine in a World - According to comscore, Google’s worldwide search share declined from 67.9 percent in June to 64.1 percent in July. This drop was largely due changes in the way comScore measures search and Web traffic in China, Brazil, and Russia.  As a result, Baidu’s global search market share went from 7.7 percent in June to 12.9 percent in July (based almost entirely on its strength in China alone). That makes Baidu the third largest search engine the world after Yahoo. What the recalculation highlights ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
HallMark Recognizes Gay Marriage - Ok this is a self serving post, as we own gaymarriage.com As You know most states don’t recognize gay marriage, but now Hallmark does. The nation’s largest greeting card company is coming out with Gay Marriage cards. “It’s our goal to be as relevant as possible to as many people as we can,” Hallmark spokeswoman Sarah Gronberg Kolell said. The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimates that more than 85,000 same-sex couples in the United States have entered into a legal relationship ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Moniker.com Affiliate Summit Online Auction Closes Today - Moniker.com is holding an online auction through SnapNames.com for the Affiliate Summit Show. All auctions close at 3:15pm EST through Snapnames, unless extended based on Snapnames normal bidding rules. You can download the entire list of domains here: Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Moniker Live Auction From SES Nets $19K - The live domain auction conducted by moniker.com from the SES show in San Jose just completed and the total was a paltry $19,050.00 Some interesting notes: The highest sale was a .US. Only 25 domains sold Only  5 domains sold for $1,000 or more. Moniker.com commission totaled a whopping $2,850. Here is the full list of the domains that sold: $4,000  groceries.us $2,100  consultingcompany.com $2,000  Leadsales.com $2,000  seoproducts.com $1,100  wardrobes.org $ 900  Upholstery.org $700  seoproviders.com $700  ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Arbitrator: Fired.com Complainant “Sorely Misguided” - World2Work Corporation loses Fired.com claim; panel has harsh words for company and lawyer. A one person panel has found in favor of the owner of Fired.com in a bizarre UDRP case. World2Work Corporation and founder Scott R. Sargis, which runs the web site Fired.tv, filed a UDRP with National Arbitration Forum to get the domain name Fired.com. This is despite not registering the trademark “Fired” until five years after Fired.com was registered. After questioning ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
SMS Common Short Codes: A Domaining Like Opportunity? - Common Short Codes seems a lot like domain names, but they aren’t a good investment opportunity yet. Have you ever seen an ad that read “Text keyword to 55112…”? Or voted on American Idol by sending a SMS text to a five digit number? If so, you’ve experienced “common short codes”. These are the 5 or 6 digit codes that you send text messages to for automated responses, voting by phone, etc. Some companies used “vanity” short codes, such as Google ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Moniker SES: Steals of a Year - If you didn’t bid in Moniker’s SES auction, you missed out on some great deals. If you haven’t already heard, Moniker’s live auction at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose was a flop. It’s just further proof that selling domains to non-domainers (unless they are into adult) is a challenge. The official tally on Moniker’s web site is about $16,000 in sales. It doesn’t include a sale of Groceries.us which appeared sold in the auction for $4,000 but ... read more ...
Wed 20th August 2008
Written by The Domains in EN
iREPORT.COM IS ROCKING - Nice story today about a little domain name called ireport.com and the success the site is having for CNN According to the story the site now has 175,000 videos and photos, 176% rise in submissions since the same time last year.  Of course last year CNN did not own the domain ireport.com Quoted from the story: “””””CNN is so committed to the platform it paid $750,000 for the iReport domain name earlier this year. More than 85,000 people have registered as “iReporters.” According to ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Next Must See Documentary “I.O.U.S.A” Opens Tommorow - A critically acclaimed new documentary about the US economy, how the budget deficits are effecting the country, the ability to fund social security and medicare in coming years, are all discussed in I.O.U.S.A opening tomorrow around the country. Click here to see the trailer Reuters said this movie “May be to the U.S. Economy what An Inconvenient Truth was to the environment.” In an exclusive one night event in select movie theaters nationwide, tomorrow, Thursday, August 21st. will include ... read more ...