In the .UK namespace there is only one king, and that is .CO.UK . Everyone in the United Kingdom knows it, most use it and it is all but too late to get a good one. Enter .ORG.UK .

Going by Nominet’s own statistics the historic rate of .ORG.UK registrations was verging on 5% of its .CO.UK cousin, however in 1999 when the price change increased volume of .CO.UK registrations to over 100,000 per month  .ORG.UK did jump to 7.5% yet did not increase further.

In March this year .ORG.UK almost hit the 10,000 new registrations per month mark, only previously beaten in 2000. This along with increasing end user sales and more domainer investing bodes well for .ORG.UK .

We believe there are three key reasons for this :

- Lack of .co.uk . Quite simply there is far more .ORG.UK varients out there free to register for a fiver than there are .CO.UK’s. Likewise to aquire Keyword.co.uk it could cost five figures, yet for the similar .ORG.UK it is likely to be under five hundred quid.

- Increased site development. There has been an upturn in website development, either by domainers or internet marketers (eg. Affiliates). They look for a UK specific domain name that is cheap and easy to develop on. .ORG.UK is rumoured to hold better stead in search engine results pages than .CC or other obscure extentions.

- New Domainers. In the last four years the activity in the .UK market has significantly increased. What once was the dwelling of a small group of country specific domainers has exploded into a worldwide commoditiy. Coupled with the lack of .co.uk the domainer looks elsewhere for registration fodder, and the .ORG.UK is the natural up and coming ccTLD.

Sales are the key indicators to an extension’s success. The end users have been snaffling up keyword and acronym .ORG.UK’s , however when domainers themselves start to invest it usually is a sure sign it has legs. It is now not unknown for .ORG.UKs to be quickly sold in the reseller market for £30-150 a piece, with the buyers expecting to hold and profit in the future.

All the figures point to a rough valuation of the .CO.UK being worth seventeen times the value of a .ORG.UK . It has risen to this  in the last three years from a start point of near reg-fee. If the prices keep going up is another question!

.Mobi owners often point to the future of handheld devices as examples of the growing market and need for their ‘lite’ versions of the web. The Register is reporting that Motorola (not a ’sponsor’ of mobi) has teamed up with a company called MicroVision to put laser projectors into their mobile phones.

Practical use of this will be to project videos, websites or any other media content outside of the mobile, thus taking the small form factor of the mobile smaller with its capabilities bigger. Similar ideas have been trialed before with projection keyboards and AV-out socket in mobiles and associated devices.

The good news keeps on coming with news that Yahoo are following Vodaphone’s lead (a .mobi ‘backer’) by offering up Novarra’s mobile-optimising technology on their OneSearch (mobile.yahoo.com) portal. This technology deduces which device is being used and re-jigs pages on the fly, quite like the current google system.

.Mobi, the sponsored top level extension aimed at mobile devices, has opened up a reserved list of 650 city names which are now ready for applications. According to the press releases this is being done as a ‘free’ release and cheekily mentions London.mobi as an example despite the Mayors office not really knowing alot about it.

The application process is in short to raise awareness of .Mobi by creating a working website and comitting to ongoing promotion :

• A description (250 words) of the proposed content / services / applications to be offered via the .mobi website corresponding to the city name.
• A description of the applicant’s marketing and promotion plans. These plans must include:
  A public launch event to local press for the city name web-site.
  A Press Release to issue in liaison with mTLD promoting the city name web-site.
• Local marketing efforts for the city name web-site at a minimum cost of €2,000 per annum.
• Examples of the applicant’s use of the string corresponding to the Offered Name in any other Top Level Domain.

Assuming that the City of London IT bods can write 250 coherent words the next few hoops could be interesting to fulfil. A new website often has budgets well in excess of €2,000 and a few press releases / public launches, however the two stumbling blocks could be the exclusive contract terms and section 3 of the above.

Does the City of London actively use a Top Level Domain containing the London string? The current website is London.Gov.UK , the logical ccTLD - hopefully the above is a typo and ccTLD’s are valid as well. You have to feel sorry for the mobile users over in another London (canada), or the other Londons around the world, who it seems have already lost any potential case for the name in the eyes of .Mobi.

As for the city names .mobi contract document there are some interesting clauses namely ;

• The new owner will create a website inside of 60 days.
• The new owner will aim to ’strengthen user loyalty and goodwill towards the .mobi’ domain.
• There is currently unspecified ‘renewal award terms’ , ‘website development schedule’ and ‘promotion schedule’ that must be agreed and met for any name to be used, and we assume continue to be used.

The application guide mentions a non-refundable fee of €150 will be paid per application, which assuming one application per name would be very close to a tasty €100,000 cash injection into the .Mobi coffers.

One further thing that stands out is the explaination of what .mobi is at the top of the application guide - "It is the first - and only - top level domain dedicated to delivering the Internet to mobile devices". There we were thinking .mobi was all about ‘lite’ versions of the web, when really it is helping us all make VOIP calls, telnet sessions, mobile friendly email and instant messenging.

It is quite worrying to see people running a top level domain not to know the difference between The Internet and The World Wide Web

It has been a busy time in Nominet Towers with both domaining papers and DRS review papers being issued.

In this first post we will look at what the DRS Review has come up with - the full paper can be found here

We feel the key points are:

- Most of the DRS will stay unchanged.
- £10 +vat will be charged to open a DRS complaint.
- For ‘none responses’ a ‘default transfer’ can be applied for costing £200 + vat.
- The DRS gravy train is still on its tracks.

The default transfer system could mean for £210 +vat an unscruplous complainant could at best take down a competitors website for thirty days, or at worst take their domain name from them.

There is currently no clarity on the processes involved and questions have been raised eg. Would the ’set aside’ be like the current DRS appeal or would it reactive the domain and bring the whole process back to square one? If the former I would ask how can Nominet justify the £3k fees on normal appeals, and if the latter what is to stop a cycle of DRS > none reply > set aside > repeat !

As I have posted on the Nom-Steer list I feel an opportunity has been lost to add in:

- A cut off point of X months where a previous registrant of a domain can make a complaint.
- A limit of how many times a single complainant can DRS a domain.
- Specify boundaries for experts to maintain consistency i.e. one expert using Google for FineCheeses.co.uk decision whereas another may have used Ask/MSN and may have altered the outcome
- Removal of the ‘three strikes’ rule, a registrant may lose three DRS complaints for whatever reasons yet the fourth may be legit and ought to be heard and tested on its own merits.

There was a large consensus that poachers (legal types offering DRS services) ought not be gamekeepers (DRS Experts) due to a potential conflict of interest. Nominet have stated that this situation would not change however steps would be taken to increase transparency.

With any complaint there will always be a party that loses and therefore will feel hard done by, however the problems occur when wider stakeholders are also affected by a decision or policy change.
It is great that the DRS is evolving but it does need to be done without creating future problems.

Domaining is an often misunderstood industry so we thought we would take the ‘online real estate’ analogy and see how far we get with it as a method of explaining what it is all about.

If we imagine domaining as a city wide industry it is possible to see parallels to offline events, structures and patterns.

At the center of the city high value properties exist; impressive skyscrapers containing offices, apartments and on the ground floor shops. The offices are the high value single word or three letter domains as used by companies or individuals, often purchased early on before domain names (or the property prices) became out of reach. The ground floor commercial areas are the generic type in domain names, Sport.co.uk Music.co.uk Poker.co.uk Clothes.co.uk etc. these are properties where whatever is inside people will always end up due to their location.

Moving further out it becomes more common to see individual ownership of decent properties but they often lack the location of the prime real estate. Bob Jones cannot afford Bob.com so ‘makes do’ with BobJones.com , likewise another Bob resorts to BobJamesJones.com . A growing trend in domain registration is to choose screen name domains, so BobJones76.com would be the equivalent of buying a green field on the edge of town and building your own home due to high prices and also lack of available land closer in.

As with real estate, some areas rise and fall in popularity depending on redevelopments or the kind of people living and working there. Recently .TV has been ‘redeveloped’ into a media based social networking extension, likewise new land (.info .mobi) is newly zoned and those who are not able to get into the city center move in at a small premium hoping that the area becomes very popular and grows into a rival center.

The owners of domains also mirror offline property owners quite closely. The city center is owned by corporations, financial institutions and very rarely individuals yet newer land is often quite diverse, yet the core services is often pre-allocated before development to ensure big businesses protect their interests. In domaining terms this is often the sunrise period in launches, the offline version of making sure big brands are included in any development.

Without stretching the analogy too far it could be said the search engines are very much like transport links. Google is the taxi company that moves people into specific areas on request. The rail network is the type in traffic, it heads one way into the city as people vaguely know what they are after and have a vague idea where it is located.

Typo traffic domains are like the Keith’s Fried Chicken outlets in the dodgier areas of town, it may say KFC above the door but it certainly is not Colonel Sanders cooking inside.

How far does this stretch? Use the comments below to add some more Domainer City analogies