Domains & DNS: March 2007 Archives

Pictures speak louder than words:

This afternoon's sessions includes a 4 hour session with EUrid staff which I am currently attending. They seem to be going over some of the statistics and facts related to the EU namespace, though whether or not they stand up to closer (and possibly more cynical) scrutiny is another matter. It should be very interesting to see if they will be this upbeat after the first round of renewals ie. after April 7th. The Belgian registry, for example, saw a massive reduction in registered domains 12 months after their free domain promotion.

There are two tutorials /sessions this afternoon covering domain aftermarket. The first session was given by Rob Hall from Momentous.ca. The salient point from Rob's talk being that the secondary market has become the primary market - much as is the case in real estate. Some people may not agree or approve with that sentiment, but the reality and figures speak for themselves. Further details of his talk are here, while you can download the slides from the ICANN site The second session is being chaired by my good friend Jothan Frakes of DomainSponsor and features Mason Cole (SnapNames), Tim Schumacher (Sedo), Tom Murphy (Name Media - owners of Afternic) and Emiliano Pasqualetti (DomainsBot). You can download the slides of their presentations on the ICANN site.

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

The first session of the day was discussing new gTLDs and IDN. Some of the salient points that came out of the session is that the decision making process is long and complicated. IDN - promote internet usage among non-English speakers (among other things) New gTLDs - avoiding issues - reserved names. An interesting discussion was held about the reserved names and other criteria.

Although the welcome ceremony for ICANN Lisboa isn't until tomorrow morning the venue in Lisbon's financial district, has been buzzing since yesterday. Delegates from every corner of the globe were arriving in dribs and drabs throughout the day. A lot of the Americans had arrived early in the morning, so were quite jetlagged. Good strong coffee helps :)

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!

I've been in contact with several people who are going to Lisbon for the ICANN meeting, but several others won't be able to make it this time which is a pity. If anyone is going that I haven't been in touch with let me know :) I was looking forward to it, but since a few people have confirmed that they will be there I feel a lot better. The only thing I'm trying to work out now is whether I'll be able to make it into the centre of Madrid and out again on the way over (without missing my flight).

The pricing of IE domains is always a topic that seems to excite people. The funny thing is when people take their own marketing too seriously. A couple of years ago I mentioned a rather silly set of statements made by a certain Irish hosting company. Why did I mention it? Well, as I said then and I say now, they don't exactly have a good track record in terms of pricing. While the rest of us were doing our best to attract business with pricing etc., they were charging a high rate. In a free market they're entitled to do so BUT when they started making crazy hypocritical claims about pricing I wasn't going to stand idly by. So what the hell is this all about? So they're matching someone else's prices? Why? What is the point? It's not as if they even have good pricing... €69 for a .ie is about €40 more expensive than the lowest price in the market at present, so it's hardly innovative pricing ... Surely they'd be better off trying to grow their own business?

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!

A couple of days ago I came across a post on Ken's blog about the new Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann website. It seems that it's now being talked about in other places. I'm not a designer, so I won't get into the entire debacle about whether Irish designers are "good enough", though you won't find me using non-Irish designers anytime soon... What does rile me however are a couple of other things about the new site:

1. It's not hosted in Ireland
2. The .ie and .com are aliased not redirects, so it's splitting on the search results

Point 1 is directly related to point 2 from an SEO perspective. From a business perspective I think it is deplorable that a state funded organisation would choose to host their online presence outside this country: blacknight@siracusa:~$ geoiplookup www.comhaltas.com GeoIP Country Edition: US, United States Irish tax payers money funds organisations like Comhaltas and the GAA (who obviously don't think Ireland is good enough for them either) Back in the 1990s I would have understood why companies and organisations chose to host their websites outside Ireland. My first few sites were hosted in the USA in the late 1990s simply because there was so little choice available in the Irish market, and what was available was expensive and lacking in features (ie. no php, mysql or anything else). It's 2007. Hosting in Ireland has come a very long way, with most of the larger Irish hosting providers actually running their own networks etc., Just take a look at the membership list of INEX these days!

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!)