Perl has been round for a while, but it’s still widely used in all sorts of systems, including websites (indeed there’s quite a bit of Perl running 123-reg).  The London Perl Workshop, as it’s called, has one over PHPNW in being completely free — so you can come along and try it out even if you aren’t sure it’s your thing.  You still need to register though.

Despite having “workshop” in the name, it does have a conference format.  The schedule has 3 tracks of talks running through the day, to cover a range of topics and ability levels, and there’s also a fourth room with half-day tutorials on web programming for anybody in the mood for some serious learning.

I’ll highlight JJ’s talk ‘Online Retail with Perl’, because it’s about his experiences creating the gift and accessories shop Penny’s Arcade, which he registered with 123-reg — perhaps it can inspire other 123-reg customers?  Let us know if it does!

And of course as well as all the talks there’s a whole lot of socializing going on, a chance for drinking and networking with others in the UK Perl community (plus a few others who are flying in especially for the event, including Tim Bunce, creator of the ubiquitous DBI module for accessing databases in Perl).  See you there?

A few points I’ve taken away from the conference today:

• The .uk domain name industry is more interesting than you might think at first glance. It really is central to the online economy in the UK, and so if you run a website or online business, it’s worth keeping an eye on what’s going on, and how it might effect you.
• Nobody seems quite sure what the impact of new domain extensions is going to be. One speaker summed it up nicely, saying that if 100 new extensions were created in a year, that’s two land rush periods (where everyone rushes to bag the best domain names) every single week. Quite how sustainable that is, and how new domain extensions will manage to get noticed in that noise are both very good questions.
• The government is clearly taking a real interest in how Nominet is run. I’ll leave others to comment on that, but it’ll be interesting to see how things develop in the next few months.
• There’s no doubt that the issues of inappropriate content and online dangers like phishing are things that everyone’s very concerned about. There are loads of ideas about how to counter them, but the general consensus seemed to be that knee-jerk reactions to specific events can cause more harm than good.

I’m off to see if I can meet some interesting people at the drinks reception. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments about today’s event.

It’s an awfully long job title, but he was introduced as “the civil servant responsible for the internet”, which, although not 100% accurate, should give you a reasonable idea of what he does.

His keynote speech here at the Nominet .uk Registrar Conference was interesting, and I’d expect to see it covered by the usual online news sites later today.

He spoke about the need for “confidence and trust in the internet”, and explained that the government’s mission was to “promote dynamic growth of all that’s positive, while attempting to mitigate all that’s negative” about the internet.

Up the list of priorities

With a major report, ‘Digital Britain’, due next year, Hendon explained that the issues of public trust and confidence in the internet are moving up the government’s list of priorities.

He questions whether typical internet users (the general public) draw much of a distinction between phishing, spam, objectionable content and other online problems. They just want them fixed, and to some extent they expect the government to be able to stop bad things happening online.

It’s part of the national infrastructure

The domain name system, continued Hendon, is a part of the national infrastructure. And he’s right; it is a vital element of the UK economy and without, it the online part of that economy might as well not exist.

Because of that, the government wants to understand the vulnerabilities of the domain names system, and wants Nominet to demonstrate that the organisation understands its own wider responsibilites to the internet-using public as a whole.

Essentially, his point was that Nominet, as guardian of an important piece of UK internet infrastructure, has a public-service mandate to fulfil.

It’s about ordinary internet users

He expressed the desire for the domain name system to work for ordinary internet users, and confessed he is “sceptical” about the value domaining brings to the UK internet economy as a whole. (Domaining is a somewhat controversial subject, as our recent post on the subject and subsequent comments demonstrate.)

What this means for how Nominet will work with the government in the future is still to be decided. However, it is clear that the government expects Nominet to continue to take its public service obligations seriously and continue to manage the .uk domain name space in a responsible way.

The next panel debate is starting any minute now. It’s all about trust and confidence in the online environment, and David Hendon is on the panel, so hopefully he’ll elaborate on his points then.

Apparently it’s a kilometre to walk right round the stadium concourse, and having gone about a quarter of the way round for lunch, I can well believe that.

There are a few interesting faces here today, including a chap I was just speaking to who owns the .com domain names of a number of very well-known politicians, plus people from the whole spectrum of registrars - including domainers and larger registrars like 123-reg.

Conference discussion so far has centred on the introduction of new gTLDs (for background, check out our article here) and the effect parked domains have on domain name prices in the secondary market.

Over lunch, people mostly seem to be discussing what the strange white things on the pitch at Wembley are. Answer? They’re massive lights to encourage the grass to grow.

The next keynote is about to start, so I’ll try and update again after that.

Lesley Cowley (LC), Nominet CEO:

- There’s going to be a generation of people coming into business who’ve never known a time without the Internet.

- We need to make it easy to create a business website so they can exploit opportunities.

Jonathan Robinson (JR), Group NBT:

- We may be in a much better position than during the last economic downturn.

LC:

- .uk can benefit from new domain suffixes.

Warren Berdo (WB), Skymarket:

- Cant see someone pinning their business to a .sco (for instance) suffix.

LC:

- Can see businesses registering different TLDs (like .sco) and using them to market to different customers. Registering all domain possibilities won’t be sustainable with lots of new domain extensions.

Nora Nanayakkara (NN), Sedo:

- The credit crunch is hitting the secondary domain name market.

Comments from audience:

- It’s great Nominet is open to all.

WB:

- If we increase the price of domain names, domain ‘touting’ will be reduced.

There’s quite a debate here around parked domains. Audience member suggests the industry needs more regulation to ‘keep the name space available’ for the people who need to use it.

Discussion around setting up a registrar trade body now- more audience members think this would be a good idea than think it would be a bad one.

First up was Bob Gilbert, Nominet Chairman. His quick introduction talked about a “dynamic and exciting” industry, but tempered by his opinion that the economic situation is likely to be “very severe”.

Next was Phil Kingsland, Director of Marketing and Communications for Nominet. He summarised the organisations’ Domain Name Industry Report (link to follow). Some of the key findings were:

• The overall rate of domain name registrations is slowing, but growth is still positive.
• There are 174 million active domain names globally
• There are about 140,000 new domain names registered every month. That’s about one for every person liing in Oxford, where Nominet is based.

One thing that really stood out for me is that lots of domain names are allowed to expire each year - but a fair proportion of these (100,000 per year) are snapped up by someone else within 10 seconds of the expiry.

That’s unbelievably fast, and really emphasises the need to keep an eye on your domain renewal dates. If you let one expire, there’s a good chance someone else will have it before you’ve blinked.

Following Phil was Matthew Yates, Campaign Manager for Nominet. He talked about the campaigns Nominet has been running over the last year or so - including the keepyour.co.uk campaign you might have seen mentioned on here previously.

He highlighted the fact that only 18% of all domain names are renewed automatically. It’s this figure, I think, combined with the speed at which domain names get snapped up after expiry, which really emphasises how important it is to manage your domain names well. Auto-renew is really easy to set up and use, yet relatively few domain owners use it. If you don’t, perhaps you should switch it on today!

There’s also a surprising 2.6% of people who let their own domain name expire, then re-register it with a new registrar. That’s really dangerous - especially when you remember you can transfer domains between registrars easily.

If you’re in that 2.6% then don’t run the risk of allowing your domain to expire before renewing it. Renew it with your existing registrar (whether that be 123-reg, or someone else), then use the transfer option to move it elsewhere. That makes it impossible for someone else to buy your domain and hold it to ransom.

The session was rounded off by Phil Kingsland again, who talked briefly about the new TLDs being proposed by ICANN. We’ve covered the issue here before, but Phil gave it some perspective.

Basically, nobody knows how many people will apply for new domain extensions, how many will get through or really what’s going to happen. He also revealed that Nominet have been approached to run any future .cym or .sco (for Wales and Scotland) domain extensions.

More to follow - there’s a panel debate up next, so I’ll try and cover that as it happens.

The first presentation is just kicking off, with the Today Program’s Sarah Montague introducing, so I’ll be back with an update shortly.

PHPNW08 is a PHP conference taking place in Manchester next week.  We know that lots of you use PHP on your websites, so we thought it worth highlighting.  It’s just one day, and on a Saturday so you don’t need your boss’s permission to go.  The conference website describes it as being for “developers, designers, managers or anyone else with an interest in the PHP programming language”.

Conferences are a great way of keeping up to date with what’s happening with a particular technology, and meeting others who work with it.  Grass roots events like this one (those run by enthusiasts rather than professional conference organisers trying to make money) are particularly good, not least because they are so cheap ‒ tickets are just £60, a bargain compared to some commercial conferences which charge £800 a day.

The talks at PHPNW08 are varied, both in their content and their level (beginners or advanced), and there are some on other technology which is often used with PHP, such as MySQL and HTML.  Check out the full schedule, and maybe we’ll see you there?

A few of us from 123-reg are heading along to find out what’s happening in the world of .uk domain names and, in a first for us, I’m hoping to live blog things as they happen.

I’ve been working in this industry for a year or so now, but the workings of Nominet are still a bit of a mystery to me. My aim is to understand a bit more about how the organisation responsible for taking care of .uk domain names works. By covering the event here I’ll try and help you understand it too.

Having said that, I’ve never covered an event like this before, so to some extent I’ll be making it up as I go along. That’s assuming, of course, the Wi-Fi works, my laptop’s battery doesn’t die and/or my mobile has a decent signal. If it goes to plan, look for posts, pictures and my thoughts, right here.

Have your say too

I’ll try and take notice of your feedback too, so please leave your comments either now or on the day. Got a burning question you want me to put to one of the panels? Let me know and I’ll do my best.

A top level domain is the part of a domain name that comes after the final dot. Existing TLDs include .com, net and .uk.

We covered this story at the time - you can read the original post here. It attracted some interesting comments so it’s worth skimming through the whole page.

A number of campaigns exist which are pushing for the creation of new TLDs including .berlin, .nyc and .pdx.

How it’s going to work

Since its original announcement, ICANN has issued lots of information explaining how new TLDs will work in practice. You can find all the details on the dedicated section of their website. The key document is the draft applicant guidebook (PDF), which explains how you can go about applying for the creation of a new TLD. Be warned: the document is 97 pages long and contains an awful lot of detail!

Everything in there is at a draft stage, and you can submit comments on the process up to 8 December. Some of the key points are as follows:

• Only “any established corporation, organization, or institution in good standing” will be able to apply for the creation of new TLDs. That means you can’t apply as an individual.
• If you apply for a new TLD, you will be required to run the registry for that TLD. For the application to be successful, ICANN will expect you to prove you are capable of doing this.
• It costs a lot to apply. The basic fee is $185,000, and you might have to pay more if there are any disputes or ICANN has to do a lot of work to check out your organisation.
• There are lots of other conditions. For instance, anyone wanting to register a geographic TLD (.london, say), will have to prove they have the support of the relevant government or authority.

In short, this isn’t something that you’ll be able to do on a whim. There will be significant obstacles to getting a new TLD set up, and it’s not something to be entered into lightly!

So what’s going to happen with these new TLDs?

Nobody seems to quite know what the take-up of new TLDs will be like, and whether they’ll make it easier to  find good domain names, or simply cause extra confusion when people are looking for a particular website online.

And it seems a number of large companies are worried about the additional cost of protecting their brands, should we end up with hundreds of new TLDs.

The Wall Street Journal ran a good article about this issue the other day, but you’re better off reading this syndicated version on the Pantagraph’s website, where you won’t have to pay to view it. The piece explains how costs could quickly snowball for companies registering additional domains:

“The companies that end up operating such domains are expected to offer trademark owners the chance to register their trademarks early for about $500 per domain, about 10 times as much as the price to the public.

A typical company might register 20 sites within each new top-level domain, making the total cost to participate in all 200 of them $2 million, says Josh Bourne, managing partner of FairWinds Partners, an Internet-strategy consulting firm.”

And this, I think, is where the piece hits the nail on the head. In order for new TLDs to succeed, they need support from some major, recognised brands. Without that, these TLDs just won’t get any recognition - people will never get used to typing .travel, .london or .hotel into their browser instead of .com.

Those big companies might decide they don’t want to support the new TLDs. This could be because it’s too expensive to do so, or they simply don’t see the point of them. If that happens, it’s hard to see how new TLDs will ever achieve anything like the profile of existing popular TLDs like .com and .co.uk.

The big gamble

We won’t know for sure how this is going to go until ICANN has confirmed how the process of setting up a new TLD will work and the first applications have come in. But for any organisation thinking of setting one up, I reckon it’s a bit of a gamble.

The costs involved in establishing a new TLD are going to be high. And it’s going to be a challenge for any new domain extension to achieve prominence in a marketplace which is unquestionably dominated by .com.

Having said that, despite the costs involved, anyone who does launch a really successful TLD could be well-placed to make a fair bit of money from it. And that, I think, is why we’ll see plenty of people putting in applications to give it a go.

Finally, there’s the international aspect to all this. Soon it will be possible to create TLDs using alternative alphabets, like Cyrillic. That sounds like a great idea (why should domains only be based on the Latin alphabet?), but what impact will it have on established domains like .com?

What’s your opinion? Is this going to make it much easier for people to find suitable domains? And if you had a spare $185,000 which you had to spend on applying for a new TLD, what would you choose and why?

More information

• Read about new TLDs on the ICANN website
• More background on the draft guidebook from the ICANN blog