December 2009 Archives

Google, the American public corporation,has lost an arbitration over the domain name  Groovle.com. 

Google contended in the complaint that the dispute domain name is confusingly similar to its trademark.

Small Canadian start-up claims victory.

The City of Paris has recently filled a lawsuit against the owner of Paris.org, who has owned the domain since 1995. A UDRP dispute would not be effective, as the domain is not parked or being used in bad faith, so they have decided to take it to French Court.

This is part of the City of Paris' continuing venture to find a court who will grant them exclusive rights to any domain containing the word "Paris." Judging by the results of their previous lawsuits and UDRP disputes, it is not likely that they will be awarded the rights to Paris.org.

Similar to the Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods domain name rush a huge amount of domainers have been quick to register Brittany Murphy domain names, after she recently passed away.

Whenever something happens in the celebrity world or there is a celebrity scandal it make people buy domains names. Celebrities draw domain traffic; Paris Hilton is a celebrity known for scandals and KeywordDiscovery states that the search term 'Paris Hilton' is searched for approximately 19,398 times a day!

As soon as there is a scandal from a celebrity there is a sudden rush to register domain names appropriate to the scandal. For example, Tiger Woods has recently been in the spotlight for indiscretions he made and on the day the Wood's scandal was publicized, 30th November 2009, the domain name: TigerWoodsCheater.com was created.

At some point you will want to sell your domains. Here are five places where you can do it:

• Forums. Domain forums are probably the most common and popular way to sell domains. Please note that most of the members of forums are people like you: domainers and people looking to resell domains. This is not the right place to find end users in search of a specific domain.
• Brokers. They are specialist in selling domains, like an estate agent is a specialist at selling houses. They will typically keep 20% of the selling price but know a lot more people than you do so can probably find better buyers. Also, as they are paid on commission, they want to get the best price for the domain.

VeriSign has recently announced that they will be raising .COM and .NET annual fees as of July 1st, 2010. ICANN has an agreement that VeriSign is allowed to raise their .COM fees by up to 7% per year. VeriSign took advantage of this in the first two years of its contract, raising .COM registration from $6.00 to $6.86. It was assumed that VeriSign would increase its prices every year to maximize profits, but it did not in 2009.

The root servers are name servers on the Internet which contain data for the DNS.

The root server system is vital in the Internet's successful functionality; if a name server cannot find a particular domain it will ask the root server.

A complete agenda has been released including the selection of Frank Schilling, Ron Sheridan and Adam Riox as contest judges.The PITCHfest contest will uncover new, innovative products or services designed to enhance the value of parked or developed domain names by driving increased traffic and revenue.  The prize -- the DOMAINfest Global 2010 PITCHfest Service Innovator trophy -- will be awarded for the idea with the most creativity, viability, originality, and revenue potential. Individuals or businesses interested in entering the PITCHfest competition can find contest rules and an online submission form.  
 

 

There are some letters which affect greatly the value of a domain name, especially if the domain is short and has no specific meaning. Some of the most hated letters are the following:

Paris, the capital city of France, applied for .paris to become a top level domain (TLD) in June, 2008.

The TLD for France is .fr.

The Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, began a campaign on behalf of Paris, on December 9th 2009, to support the .paris TLD request.

Google ventured into new territory this week with the launch of a new URL-shortening service it's calling Goo.gl.

Unlike some existing and high-profile shorteners such as TinyURL and Bit.ly, Goo.gl is not a general-purpose link shrinker that users can access by going to a standalone site. Instead, it's been built into Google products, beginning with Google's browser toolbar and its Feedburner RSS service. Both of those services can now create shortened Goo.gl URLs that link to the source content while using fewer characters. This is especially important for sharing on places like Twitter, where there are size limits.