There’s been lots of interesting news in the domain name world recently. We went a bit quiet here last week (sorry about that), so instead of covering each story individually, here’s a summary of some of the big things that have caught my eye lately:

• It’s been an eventful couple of weeks in the world of banking, and as the BBC reports, even domain name speculators have been getting in on the act, registering domains like lloydstsbhbos.com in anticipation of the Halifax’s acquisition by Lloyds TSB.
• In the same vein, over at Domain Name Wire they reckon that domain names might be a good investment if stock markets keep falling. They explain in another article that “whereas the stock market seems to swing wildly each day, the domain market holds somewhat stable.” At the very least, it’s an interesting way to look at spreading your investment risk.
• Some domain names have been changing hands for big money too. The topical financialaid.com went for $800,000 and LifeInsurancePolicies.com went for $15,000. Oh, and according to the Domainers Gazette, someone paid $69 for possibly the worst domain name ever. Read the rest of this entry »

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It looks like at least one domain name opportunist is trying to cash in on the coverage surrounding John McCain’s presidential running mate, Sarah Palin.

The Alaskan was catapulted onto the world stage last week when she became only the second ever female US vice-presidential candidate.

We don’t normally cover US politics in great detail on this blog, but I noticed this morning that someone is offering the catchy domain name, esarahpalin.com on eBay. You can find the auction here.

Bidding starts at a bargain $10m, but if you want to be absolutely certain of securing this awesome domain name, you’ll need to fork out $21m to close the auction early using eBay’s Buy it Now feature. Read the rest of this entry »

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The National High-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) used to investigate serious and organised crimes committed on the internet. In 2006 it became part of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

Although the NHTCU ceased to exist about two years ago, its old website (which used to be located at www.nhctu.org) is still linked to by a number of high-profile websites. For instance, the BBC added a link to it from this story just over a month ago.

With the old website address getting this sort of attention, you’d have thought the domain name would be worth taking care of. It clearly attracts some traffic (probably quite a lot), so commonsense suggests it would be a good idea to keep renewing it.

After all, if it was allowed to expire, the domain name could be snapped up by anyone. They could use it for anything. For instance, someone could use the address to host a malicious website which could infect computers with viruses. Read the rest of this entry »

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As reported over on the Nominet news pages, the seven millionth .uk domain has recently been registered.

That’s another milestone for the .uk registry, which is still growing at a fairly impressive rate - it only passed six million in July last year.

A good proportion of those domains are registered through 123-reg; back in March we became the first UK registrar to amass over a million domains on a single tag.

This news underlines the fact that .uk domains are still as recognisable as ever, with many UK-based companies and individuals registering them as well as, or in preference to .com addresses. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve mentioned a few domain name disputes here in the last few months. Another has just caught my eye. It involves that online behemoth, Google, and a chap called Jan Jeltes from Eden Hills near Adelaide in Australia.

Jeltes registered 26 domain names, all of which contain the term Googler. They included:

• businessgoogler.com
• domaingoogler.com
• googlegoogler.com (this one in particular seems to be asking for trouble!)
• travelgoogler.com
• newsgoogler.com

Unsurprisingly, Google took a dim view of these domains and lodged a complaint on 1 July. It was dealt with by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

At the time the dispute was lodged, most of these domains were pointing to a blog containing comments on the news. However, domaingoogler.com led you to a site offering several domains - including a couple of disputed ones - up for sale. Read the rest of this entry »

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Watching Dragons’ Den on BBC2 last night, I found myself literally shouting at the TV at one of the prospective investments. It was a website that has video recipes for people to watch and follow on the domain name ifoods.tv.

The two candidates stated they had approx 15,000 unique impressions per month, which is a lot for a site that has yet to really take off, with the majority of the traffic coming from the USA. That final fact surprised a couple of Dragons, and myself, seeing as they were based in Ireland.

However, it soon became clear how they had achieved such good traffic levels and why so many came from the USA. They were essentially trading on typos from a popular US-based site called ifood.tv (singular compared to the other site’s plural). Read the rest of this entry »

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The dotCYM campaign has been running for a little while now. The aim of the campaign is to get Wales its own domain extension - .cym

If successful, websites would be able to choose addresses like www.yourwebsite.cym.

With the recent announcement that ICANN plans to allow the creation of loads of new domain extensions, the creation of .cym (as well as a possible .sco for Scotland) seems much more likely.

And the dotCYM campaign got another boost recently when the Welsh assembly government decided to give it a £20,000 grant. The cash will help prepare a bid to put to ICANN, the organisation that manages domain names.

You can read more about the possible implications of a .cym extension over on Philip Virgo’s Computer Weekly blog. The BBC also reported on the story.

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Nominet, the .uk registry, today announced the start of its www.keepyour.co.uk renewals campaign which will be running in print and online throughout August and September.

The focus of the campaign is to raise renewal rates by encouraging registrants to think about the value of their domain name.

It seems co.uk domains are becoming increasingly valuable – for instance, we reported in February how Cruises.co.uk had sold for £560,000. If you are interested, you can find recent .uk sales on DomainPrices.co.uk.

It is also important to look beyond the simple ‘real estate’ value of the name itself and consider the value in terms of traffic your domain name has before you can let it expire. If you forget to renew your domain, your visitors have nowhere to go other than your competitor’s site.

With this in mind, our 123-reg control panel allows you to easily manage your .uk renewals. Simply follow this path:

Login > Domain Renewals > Select domains > Renew

We also have auto-renew turned on by default in your account and we allow you to view your domains as a list to monitor expiry dates so you stay online as long as you want to.

With over 1 million .uk domains on our systems we fully support Nominet in this campaign and encourage you to love your .uk!

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We’ve mentioned previously how important it is to keep an eye on the expiry dates of your domain names.

But in case you haven’t got the message yet, here’s a high-profile domain name expiry story to hammer home the point.

As reported by The Register, this time it was the turn of Emirates. The Dubai-based airline managed to let its emirates.com domain name expire earlier this week. As a result, instead of being able to book seats on the enormous new Airbus A380, visitors to the company’s website saw a generic domain name parking page. Oops.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Back in December, Google announced something new called Knol. It’s a sort of competitor to Wikipedia. They opened it to everyone this week, so now you and I can log on and write about things we know about. Or, I suppose, about things we don’t know about.

Anyway, either someone at Google didn’t do their domain research before naming the service, or did it and decided to ignore what they found. As a result, a Dutch company’s website has benefited from a large amount of unexpected traffic.

That’s right, this Knol sells steamcleaners, and just happens to trade under the domain knol.com. They’ve seen such a spike in visitors that they’ve taken to putting a message on their homepage. Most of it is in Dutch but one sentence stands out:

NOTE: We sell steamcleaning equipment and don’t sell our domain!!

Perhaps Google did put in an offer for the address after all.

There’s more on this story over at The Next Web, including a rundown of what the Dutch text of the company’s message says.

Because Google is such a huge brand, it probably doesn’t need to worry about this too much. Its announcements garner so much attention and its other domains have such high prominence that the service is unlikely to fail because they haven’t secured knol.com.

However, if you’re starting a new business or website, you don’t generally have the luxury of big-brand backing. That means it’s important to do your research and choose a domain carefully, so your website stands out and is easy to find online.

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