Business: March 2007 Archives

I've spent the last few hours in ICANN meetings where the topic of discussion has been the future of WHOIS. It's a very hot topic, though I do get the distinct feeling that:

• ICANN meetings involve a lot more discussion than decision-making
• A non-American viewpoint is not overly welcome

What ICANN are trying to decide is how to deal with WHOIS data. They want to remove a lot of the detail from the whois, but they seem to have placed far too much emphasis on US legislation. They seem to have ignored the EU data privacy concerns. You can read the document being discussed here

Crazy one week domain offer - register or transfer a .ie with Blacknight for a mere 25 euro. Full details here Go to the Blacknight site to order!

While I was at DomainFest in LA I got to meet a lot of interesting people in the domain / hosting / internet / online business, so going to ICANN Lisbon was a natural followup. Unfortunately I've been rather busy over the last few weeks, though that's probably a good complaint to have as well :) In any case I only got round to booking my flights this evening. Trying to find reasonably priced flights to Lisbon isn't as easy as it should be - thank God for sites like Expedia.it (the English version kept on giving me pricing in dollars, so I opted for the Italian version) and Sky Scanner! So my flights are booked and now all I have to do is find a hotel. I've ended up taking quite a circuitous route, flying Dublin - Madrid - Lisbon (it could have been worse if I'd ended up with Lufthansa!), so depending on how the times work out I may even get to pop into Madrid for a couple of hours. I haven't been to Lisbon for about 10 years. I was there twice in the 90's with my girlfriend at the time. We were poverty-stricken students. We were in love. It was romantic. Though the hotels were far from it! I swore the last time I was there that if I ever went back I would stay in a semi-decent hotel, though I never imagined it would take me practically ten years to get back there!

I get cold calls from sales people on a regular basis. Some of the callers are very nice and charming etc., and we have pleasant conversations. Others should really choose another field of work Really - they are not suited to direct selling. If you ring me up and try to sell me advertising you need to tell me why I should do it. This afternoon a very nervous sales person rang trying to sell me advertising in a new magazine. Or maybe it wasn't a new magazine.. He couldn't really make up his mind. Questioning him about this upset him When he told me that we should advertise in it because we "made websites" I naturally corrected him and asked him what he thought we did.. and why hadn't he even looked at our website. He had hung up. How mature So if you get a call from a rather nervous guy selling advertising in a publication that might be new or might not be (he may have decided by the time he calls you) then watch out!

Realex have won a very tasty contract - the online payments for one of the largest online shops in Europe - CDWow! While I've known about this for several months I had promised their CEO, Colm Lyon, not to blog about it until they'd officially announced it, which I see they've now done. I'm delighted for Colm. He deserves every success.

I love reading marketing material. Sometimes you learn something new. Sometimes you giggle. Sometimes you giggle so much you fall off your chair. According Amas' latest report:

Almost two-thirds of businesses, or 64%, had websites in 2006, a rise of four percentage points on the previous year.

Wow! Are they talking about the same country I live and work in? Oh wait.. there's an explanatory footer:

Sources: Central Statistics Office: Information Society and Telecommunications 2006, survey of 12,219 companies employing 10 or more

(my emphasis) So what does that mean? Do companies with fewer than 10 staff not count? I doubt if their owners would be overly impressed to find out that they're not actually counted.. Or is it simply a "clever" ploy to make people feel that we're doing so much better online than other countries? A very large proportion of Irish businesses still do not have websites. They *may* have a domain, but all you have to do is take a walk through any Irish town to see how many are still using free hotmail.com (and similar) email addresses. A holding page does not a website make. I don't know, but it sounds like pointless headline grabbing if you ask me. Of course any report that suggests that meta content is as important as theirs does would make me worry.. Everyone else has been saying the opposite for ages ... Maybe they've rehashed a report from a few years ago when it did actually matter as much as they claim. Don't get me wrong, meta content is important, but whereas a few years ago the meta tags, such as "description" and "keywords" were essential that is no longer the case, as so many online marketers were gaming the search engines. In some respects what really bugs me about the report is the way they talk in absolutes, as if their "findings" were "gospel". Press releases can be amusing, but they can also backfire badly when someone examines them a little bit more closely. A recent example of that being Captivate's press release that was covered by ENN, then slated by RedCardinal and ENN's blog! The moral of the story, if there is one, be sure that you can actually lead by example of know what you are talking about before trying to grab a couple of column inches .... Then again, who actually pays any attention to any of these press releases? Are we all producing press releases to keep ourselves happy or simply to provide sales leads for publications' marketing departments? (I always get offered plenty of ad space when we run an ad in a national paper and get plenty of useless sales calls after a press release from people selling to me NOT buying - obviously!)