According to numerous reports the landrush registrations for the .ME toplevel domain (operated by a partnership of GoDaddy & Afilias) is encountering problems. While several registrants are notified of their successful registrations of domains like “watch.me” and “hug.me”, it is not clear who will end up owning those domains.
(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com
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The Domains has got the results of the Silent Auction for the Geodomain Expo. The total sales add up to $25,000.00 USD for 30 domains.
(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com
Domain Convergence, October 6-8, 2008, Niagara Falls
While the power outage was affecting the Vancouver area, DomainNameNews.com researched to see whether domains redirecting to Hitfarm and Name Administration were reachable. Hitfarm.com and sites like Vancouver.com were offline. We also reported that several domains we checked were redirected showing DomainSponosor landers instead of Hitfarm landers. During the outage, we were unable to reach Hitfarm so we made the assumption that this was a “Plan B”. We were wrong.
After speaking to company officials yesterday and working through some issue, the company confirmed that “Hitfarm.com User Interface, Vancouver.com, NameView.com & Reinvent.com sites were down, but Hitfarm monetization platform was unaffected.” Hitfarm domains that DomainNameNews.com found redirecting to DomainSponsor landing pages were not a result of a “plan B” caused by this power outage. Don Ham of Hitfarm stated “All PPC traffic continued to monetize and was unaffected by the power outage. We have servers all over the world so we serve the names as close to 100% as possible.” The domains DNN found going to Domain Sponsor pages were a result of technical change over we were making. I had briefly changed over the DNS server on my computer to use an older DNS server that had not been recently updated. Our techy caught some hell for this one. The domains we had checked were cached in the DNS and reflected old redirects to DomainSponsor. Our apologies to Hitfarm on the confusion.
Name Administration sites were completely offline for what we estimated to be close to 2 hours. We followed up with Frank Schilling of Name Administration who told us that the company also has planned for these type of situations. The company “learned the lesson of diversified hosting after factcheck.com.” Schilling stated that he believed the company sites were down for approximately an hour on Monday.
A power outage in Vancouver is taking a huge hit on some in the domain industry today. Domain Name News noticed that Name Administration parking sites were not resolving earlier today at around 1pm CST. The many domains owned by the company such as ceilingfans.com and personalloans.com were still unreachable at the time of this writing. More about this story on page 2.
Hitfarm.com, a company based in Vancouver, also appear to be affected by this outage. Although, it appears that the company has found an alternative source to redirect domains. Hitfarm pages now seem to have switched all off of the companies internally run landing pages and are coming up with a Domain Sponsor landing page. NOTE : Correction/Update to Story at this Link. It’s good to see a company proactive about emergency situations like this. Many large scale operations would be hit hard by an extended outage such as this one.
Name Administration and many large sites in the Vancouver area use Internet provider Peer 1. Early today when we noticed the pages down, our technical staff traced back the outage to Peer 1. In checking out the company site and their forums they are reporting the following :
1) The fire started at 9am in an underground vault on Richards Street. BC Hydro would not let VFD in to extinguish the fire for 2 hours as they were hoping it would burn itself out. It did not so VFD sprayed water into the vault to extinguish.
2) The vault is now full of water and they will not be able to even begin repairs for 6 to 8 hours from now.
3) BC Hydro will attempt to put some parts of downtown on alternative transformers. They do now know which parts will be put back online as of yet. The main priority for them is getting traffic lights operational for rush hour.
Picture copyright Flickr user Carol Browne
(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com
Visit our Calendar of Domain Industry Events.
As just announced in his newsletter and on his blog, Rick Latona has now joined the Live Domain Auction Business and will be one of the five live auction providers at the coming Targeted T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Show in New York in September. It appears that each of the auction providers will be given one hour to hold their auction.
(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com
Domain Convergence, October 6-8, 2008, Niagara Falls
Bido.com just experienced their highest Domain Sale to date with DebtNews.com selling for $10,628.00 with 60 bids.
(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com
Visit our Calendar of Domain Industry Events.
The new 2.0 firmware for the iPhone and iPod Touch includes a new Safari shortcut that goes beyond “.com”.
According to The Unofficial Apple Weblog, when you type in your web address you can now hold down the “.com” button to get the choice of three more extensions - “.net”, “.edu” and “.org”.
There is no word on whether or not “.mobi” will ever be added to the list.
[via Tuaw.com]
(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com
Domain Convergence, October 6-8, 2008, Niagara Falls
According to an article by Information Week, attorney Hal K. Levitte spent over $887.67 on his Google Adsense campaign to advertise his legal services and is now suing Google for placing $136.11 worth of those ads on parked domain pages. Out of the 202,528 impressions on parked domains, Levitte only received 668 clicks and zero conversions.
Neither the article nor the suit addresses the fact that conversion rates can fluctuate based on any number of factors and do not depend entirely on the traffic source/quality. Landing page, ad copy, placement, timing, audience, product offering and many other factors play into conversion rates. Levitte’s conversion rates from the other $751.56 were not mentioned, neither were those derived from other traffic sources. However, by taking a brief scan of his website, LevitteInternational.com, one can assume his conversion rates may be consistently low.
Levitte advertised his services prior to Google introducing the option to opt-out.
[via Domain Name Wire]
(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com
Domain Convergence, October 6-8, 2008, Niagara Falls
We just released a new RSS Feed Management system to DomainTools that allows subscribers to monitor alerts and other paid services using RSS feeds instead of email updates. Email alerts have bugged me for a while because they clog my inbox, RSS gets announcements out of the inbox and in a more usable area. We are not getting rid of email alerts on anything, however going forward everything on DomainTools that can email users will have its own micro-feed. All micro-feeds of a certain type will have grouped-feed where a person can subscribe to a bunch of micro-feeds all contained in one feed.
The flexibility that RSS extends to our users is that they don’t need an email client to monitor our alerts. One of the obvious uses is setting up a schedule web process to check the RSS feed and do something based on the results it finds in the RSS location. The more obvious use is plugging the feeds into an RSS reader like Google Reader.
We have two types of RSS feeds available on all things. The first is HTML markup RSS feed like you would expect in an email. The other if an XML style 
that is strictly for parsing by a computer on the other side and is designed for only computers. This will allow more computers around the world to interface with DomainTools.
This release only has four group feeds available right now, but in the near future we will be releasing the Domain Monitor alerts and other missing products to the Global Feed as well. We are very committed to RSS feeds on every service we offer.
Just a quick security note: Do not share your RSS feeds with other people, there is only one RSS access key per account and you are giving away all your RSS streams to every feed you have if you give away just one stream. If you make this mistake, just login and reset your security key inside the RSS Feed Management System. It will be impossible for people to guess your key which means all your RSS feeds are secure unless you disclose the RSS feed URL to the other people.