They could quite literally become the hottest domains on the planet if the internet governing body Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) give the go ahead tomorrow to a new  top level domain – the .xxx.

Back in 2005, ICANN gave the nod to the creation of the domain but two years later reversed that decision following large scale protest on moral grounds from conservative groups, mainly within the USA.

Now an independent review by the American Arbitration Association’s International Centre for Dispute Resolution has declared that decision unfair and has the issue back for re-consideration by the ICANN board at their meeting in Nairobi, Kenya.

ICM Registry who put the plans forward for the .xxx domain and would oversee the sale of the addresses, suggest that if the go-ahead is given, the domain names could be on sale before the end of the year. However, ICANN is unlikely to make a snap decision and are expected to throw the issue back for consultation with its members and the internet community as a whole.

The .xxx domain proposal started long before ICANN’s first approval. Back in 2001 it was proposed as a way of filtering pornography on the internet with an immediate identifier of the content. Although any scheme would be voluntary – porn-sites could still be registered under other domains such as .com too – it might help to re-organise the internet and in particular search engines, becoming clogged by content that is less than family-friendly.

Ironically, the ICANN deliberation comes less than a week before sex.com – seen by many as one of the most valuable domain names in the world – comes up for auction in New York with a starting price of US$1 million. The domain was reportedly purchased for US$14 million back in 2006 by a group of private investors under the guise of Escom LLC but the company appears to have defaulted on the loan used to secure it, leading to the lender forcing sale.

What are your thoughts about a new .xxx domain?

Could it help clean up the internet?

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Worldwide, millions of us partake in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. But which country has made the most significant contribution to the social media phenomenon? Somewhat inadvertently, Montenegro is a real contender for this accolade.

Like a few other lucky countries before them, Montenegro has been blessed with a highly desirable Top Level Domain (TLD) extension. The .me TLD offers immediately obvious benefits to the social media community. And in an online culture obsessed with individual identity, droves of us are clambering to register our .me domains. In fact, over 320,000 .me domains have been registered since 2008.

The .me domain isn’t only useful to social media users. Facebook themselves have secured the fb.me domain; this allows users to locate their Facebook page by simply typing in www.fb.me/yourname, as opposed to a lengthy URL. Another notable site is www.despicable.me, which is being used to promote a forthcoming movie of the same name. Many companies are also using .me to denote a reference to the Middle East region within their URLs.

There’s plenty of scope for anyone to conjure up a catchy spin on the .me domain. After all, it’s often the case that an innovative online branding opportunity will determine which products and services businesses bring to the market. An imaginative and unique domain name can generate a colossal number of hits. And with the right business plan in situ, the revenue could come rolling in.

So why not make a brew and see what interesting .me domains you can come up? Then use our domain checker to see if your creative inspirations have beaten the rush. Normally we’d ask you to share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment below, but this is one time we recommend you keep your ideas to yourself. Just make sure you get your best .me domains registered before someone else pips you to the post. And there’s never been a better time to register yours; we’re offering .me domains for just £3.88 in our January sale, that’s 70% of the normal price.

Even if you don’t have a business, if you can think up a winning .me domain there’s every chance someone will want to buy it off of you. You’ll be in good company; enterprising individuals are always on the ready to take full advantage of any adaptable linguistic quirks in domain extensions. For example, those with business acumen recognised the marketability of Tonga’s .to TLD, which provided futile ground for domain names such as: where.to, go.to and how.to, while the Pacific island of Tuvalu gained great popularity in the world of media with their .tv TLD.

There something quite odd about seeing TLDs (originally conceived to indentify a nation) being re-orientated in the name of online marketing. That’s the web for you; the old rules don’t always apply, and the new ones are there for the making.  As we’ve already said, keep your .me domain ideas to yourself. However, it will be great to hear any views you have on the way that TLDs are manipulated for marketing purposes.

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Part of the challenge of buying a domain name is juggling alternative spellings and domain extensions to find a decent one.

But imagine if none were taken and you could pick any domain name you like. What would you have? And why?

CreativeMorning is a regular event which happens in New York. We’ve not been (it’s too far from London and we’d never get it through on expenses), but we noticed they used this simple concept as an icebreaker, asking people to scribble down the domain they’d most like to own.

You can see what people chose on Flickr. For such a simple idea, it offers a surprising insight into people’s personalities, priorities and motivations. Or we can pretend it does – the scientific basis of such judgements is probably flaky, to say the least.

Still, it’s a good game to play. You can take a guess at who doesn’t like early mornings, who’s got a cold, but definitely not swine flu – and who’s into buying and selling domain names for money.

So, over to you. If you could choose any domain you like, what would it be? And why would you pick it? Leave a comment and let us know.

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We imagine the people running the online branch of world famous toy shop Hamleys were feeling a little red-faced last week. Just as the whole world’s thoughts were turning to Christmas shopping and the festive lights in London’s West End were being switched on, the Hamleys website was looking a little, er, switched off.

Instead of being offered the chance to browse and buy a huge range of toys, visitors to hamleys.com were met with a standard holding page from a domain name registration company. The cause? The company let its domain name expire – meaning it no longer pointed to their website.

Although Hamleys seems to have acted fast to fix the problem and restore its website, a report in the Telegraph suggests it was still down for about a day and a half. Most of that downtime was probably caused by the time it takes for changes to a domain name to make their way through the whole internet.

Whatever the exact cause, for Hamleys, a day and a half’s worth of online sales must be significant, especially in the run-up to Christmas.

An elementary mistake?

Of all the mistakes to make, forgetting to renew your domain name seems like a pretty elementary one. Yet when you have loads of other things to worry about, it’s easy to overlook. The same thing happened to Emirates and GMTV in 2008, so it’s not only Hamleys who have suffered the embarrassment.

The solution? If your domain name is important, set it up so that when it comes close to expiring, it gets renewed automatically. All 123-reg customers can use this feature – go here to learn more about auto-renewal.

We can only assume Hamleys have learnt this lesson now. We’ll know for sure in October 2010, when their domain renewal will come round again.

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Big changes are afoot in the world of domain names. By the middle of 2010, the first domains in non-Latin scripts should be up and running.

This will make domain names written in Chinese, Cyrillic and Arabic a reality – up till now, domains have only been able to contain Latin characters.

This means we’ll start to see domain names containing all sorts of unfamiliar characters – well, unfamiliar to those of us who don’t understand those languages, at least.

What’s the point?

Billions of people across the world never use the Latin alphabet in their lives. This is a key step in making the internet more accessible and understandable to those people. That’s what makes it important.

The whole point of the changes is to create a universal address system that will work anywhere and everywhere – so every computer in the world can connect with every other.

But first things first: to begin with, the change will only apply to country code top level domains (like .uk) which are controlled by national governments. Read the rest of this entry »

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Interesting little domain name related story in The Guardian last week. The domain name extension .yu, the country code for the now-disintegrated former Yugoslavia, was finally retired last Wednesday.

This extension has been replaced by .rs (Serbia) and .me (Montenegro), although at the time the Guardian article was written, about 4,000 .yu domains hadn’t switched to one of these new extensions yet. Any sites which didn’t make the move will now be unavailable.

It’s not often that domain name extensions get removed from use. And the relative ease at which .yu has been phased out seems to contrast quite strongly with .su, a relic from the days of the Soviet Union.

Despite the fact the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, registrations of .su domains actually increased in 2008. There’s a plan to phase it out too, but it’s been met with a reasonable amount of resistance from people nostalgic for the days of the USSR – as well as from internet entrepreneurs who think that can make money out of these anachronistic domains.

Free market entrepreneurs making money from the old Soviet Union’s domain name extension? Surely we can’t be alone in seeing the irony in that.

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Every website needs to woo search engines like Google and Yahoo. But forget boxes of chocolates, flowers and expensive dinner dates, search engines are only interested in one thing…optimisation.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the art of courting search engines. Yes, they can be the most elusive of prospects. But don’t get yourself into a hot flush; there are plenty of ways to win search engine love. So here’s our quick and easy guide to becoming a true search engine aficionado.

Speak the language of love

How do you charm a search engine? Well, you can’t just whisper sweet little nothings in its ear – that won’t work. Instead, search engines coo to the tones of something called metadata, and thankfully this sliver-tongued art is relatively easy to master.

Metadata appears at the top of a HTML page (in between the <head> and </head> tags), and its here that the keywords, which can melt search engine hearts, reside. Simplicity dictates that keywords should be relevant to your site’s name (as seen in the URL), theme and purpose. But, as so often in affairs of the heart, things can get complicated. So here are some handy SEO tips for keywords:

1)    Firstly, establish which words people use when searching for your type of site.
2)    Try to use keywords your competitors haven’t used.
3)    Think about whether your site has a unique niche which it can exploit, such as a service or location.
4)    Remember, people aren’t machines – they type all sorts of phrases when searching online, so it pays to think creatively.
5)    Also, use keywords for your link text – never use ‘click here’.

Create the right impression on dates

Search engines rank sites by periodically assessing their content. This is kind of like an infinitely recurring first date, so your site needs to spruce up for every fresh encounter. Search engines hate dates when the conversation dries up, or becomes repetitive. That’s why you should never duplicate your site content from another site. Always create original material and endeavor to create fresh content as often as possible (at least once a month).

It can be tacky, but let’s face it – sometimes you need to splash the cash, and search engines are very easily impressed by a big spender who picks up the bill on a date. So make sure you buy all the available Top Level Domain (TLD) extensions (i.e., .com, .co.uk, .biz, .info) for your brand name. But just for good measure, here are a few more FREE ways to serenade search engines:

1)    Use unique and relevant titles on every page of your site.
2)    Validate your sites, so spiders can crawl through faster.
3)    Keep your pages under 1 kilobyte.

Hopefully this post will help you along the often rocky road to search engine romance. Please let us know if you’ve got any SEO tips you’d like to share with your fellow readers. In the meantime, good luck with setting those search engine hearts all aflutter.

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It’s a while since we rounded up recent domain name news for you. So here goes. First, a couple of items we found particularly interesting:

• Over at Circle ID, they explained how much money companies spend on reclaiming disputed domain names from cybersquatters and the like. We’re surprised that lots of these disputed domains (around 3,000) subsequently get left to expire. If you’re willing to fight for ownership, is renewing the domain really all that much hassle? Full story >
• On the subject of domain name disputes, ICANN (the organisation in overall charge of managing the internet’s domain name system) wants to know what you think about the way domain names currently expire. Do you think you’re given enough time to renew your domain names? Would you change how the process works? Get more information and submit a response >

And some other stories you might have missed:

• Al Gore and Mikhail Gorbachev are reportedly battling for the rights to run a new .eco domain extension. For the sake of political unity, can’t they just share? More details >
• The number of .cn (for China) domains registered has been dropping – possibly because people who registered their domains during a seriously-cheap promotion have decided not to renew. Read more >
• Microsoft has bought the domain office.com. We don’t know what they paid – but it was probably a lot. Should make a nice home for their forthcoming free version of Microsoft Office though.
• According to DN Journal, the domain name dropshippers.com sold recently for $1.5m. At that price, it wouldn’t quite squeeze into our all-time top ten, but it’s not that far off either. Full story >
• And on Domain Name Wire, they’ve discovered that Porsche, makers of the Boxster, have filed a complaint to try and gain control of the misspelt domain name boxter.com. More details >

What domain name stories have we missed over the summer? Leave a comment and let us know what’s caught your eye.

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As names go, we’re sure you’d agree that Princess-Rainbow.com is a pretty unusual one. We’ve never met anyone named after a domain name before.

So when we read about a Manchester woman who’d changed her name from Claire Forshaw to Princess-Rainbow.com by deed poll, we decided to investigate further.

The full story was in the Independent last week, but we managed to track down Princess-Rainbow.com herself to ask a few questions.

Q: What made you decide to change your name to Princess-Rainbow.com?
A: I actually didn’t think about it that much – I’d had a few drinks and it came up in conversation that it only cost around £10 to change your name. So I thought it would be funny to do it. The Princess-Rainbow bit was suggested by my boyfriend Robert Morris – we liked it so that’s what I changed it to.

Q:Have you always wanted to change your name to a web domain?
A: Yes – I’d mentioned in the past that if I ever changed my name it would have to have .com at the end, mainly for comedy value. Plus no-one I know has a web domain as a name. Read the rest of this entry »

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When news of Michael Jackson’s death broke last week, it sent shockwaves around the world. Celebrities don’t come much bigger and that meant from London to Lima, New York to New Delhi, everyone was talking about it.

Canny domainers (those people who buy and sell domain names at a profit) don’t usually miss a trick. And even while the news wires were red hot with the latest developments, it turns out many of them had spotted an opportunity and were busy buying up all sorts of Jacko-related domain names.

Check these out:

• michaeljacksonisdead.co.uk and jacksontribute.com were registered on 25 June. That’s the day Jackson died – presumably while the rest of us were asking our friends whether the story was an elaborate hoax.
• jackolives.co.uk was also registered on 25 June, perhaps by a domainer convinced the story was untrue. This one’s my favourite actually, because initially I misread it as Jack Olives. Read the rest of this entry »

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