After a wide-ranging panel discussion the conference broke for lunch in one of Wembley Stadium’s restuarants. Big stadia are strange places when there isn’t an event on, and Wembley is no exception, with large open spaces devoid of people and long corridors which seem to go on forever.

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.

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The first session of the Nominet .uk registrar conference has ended. The next session starts in 15 minutes, so here’s a summary of some of the interesting points.

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 organisation’s Domain Name Industry Report (PDF, 1MB). 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.

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The Nominet .uk registrar conference is being held today at Wembley Stadium. I’ve just arrived, after a hike round to find the right conference room.

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

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That’s the north west of England (so apologies to our readers in Oregon or Wester Ross or the north west of any other country), more specifically Manchester.

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?

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Next Wednesday it’s the annual Nominet .uk registrar conference. The conference is being held at Wembley Stadium, and while it’s unlikely to be most exciting event that particular venue has ever hosted, it is a chance for all the .uk registrars (like 123-reg) to get together and catch up on the latest in the industry.

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.

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In July, ICANN (the organisation in overall charge of managing the internet’s domain name system) announced it was going to allow the creation of additional top level domains (TLDs).

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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Just lately we’ve encountered a few instances of domain name scam emails circulating. A couple of people in the office have received them, and just the other day one of our readers left an excellent comment on an old post here about the same subject.

We’ve mentioned scams before, and that old article is still the best place to go for information on spotting the different types of domain scam you might encounter. However, because there seem to be a few emails doing the rounds, we thought we’d flag the problem again.

They want your domain names

Domain scams performed by email are generally designed to achieve one of two things:

1. To get you to pay over the odds for domain names you probably don’t need.
2. To trick you into disclosing login details for your domain name control panel.

Clearly it’s a real pain to fall for either of these, but if a scammer gains access to your control panel, they could steal domains from you. That can be catastrophic, particularly if you’ve built a strongly-branded business on the back of your domain name. Read the rest of this entry »

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You’d have to be trying really hard to have failed to notice that next Tuesday, people all across the USA will go to the polls to elect their next President.

Every detail of the race has been covered online, on TV and radio, in the newspapers and on the web. So if you’ve already heard enough about it, you should probably stop reading this now.

Still with me? Great. One of the things I’ve found most interesting about the whole thing is the way the web has played an absolutely key role. Both candidates have been using the internet to try and energise and mobilise supporters and raise campaign funds, with varying levels of success.

And a plethora of sites offering coverage, mashups and opinions have sprung up. One of my favourites has been Current TV’s Hack the Debate, which broadcast each presidential debate live and allowed users to send in comments via Twitter. These were displayed over the video of the debates in real time.

Excellent online magazine Slate has also offered lots of innovative coverage, including its poll tracker and map the candidates, which shows you where the campaigns have visited and what they did while they were there. Read the rest of this entry »

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Links are the holy grail of any website with aspirations of being ranked in the top 20 results on Google, both in terms of quantity and quality. How you go about getting those links is the area of SEO that sets one site apart from another. Bought, traded or mutual links can only get you so far, eventually you need to take it to the next level and have sites linking to you because you do something so awesome that they want to, with nothing asked in return.

To encourage sites to link to them, savvy site owners create content that is known as ‘link bait’. These are stories, articles, tools, freebies, comment etc that have been created pretty much with the sole aim of other sites linking to them and are so useful, controversial, funny, original or insightful that another website refers back to it and says ‘go here to have a read’. Below are my top 6 examples of link bait (if you know of some other good examples, leave a link below):

1. www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Their whole site is littered with link bait (although they are an SEO company, so you would expect that), but this piece stands out for me. An in depth and comprehensive analysis of SEO factors from the industry’s leading voices. You could charge for this and people would buy it.

2. www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
A great example of a site offering a scaled down version of it’s tool for free. Even this version is good enough for most small to medium sized sites.

3. http://www.carling.com/ipint_details.html
I own an iPhone and this was one of the first apps I downloaded. By offering something quirky and original (although the makers of iBeer might question that) with the wow factor, Carling has created a great link bait generator off the back of a branding exercise.

4. www.designerstoolbox.com
A great resource for anyone writing creative briefs or designing for the web, I would argue at least 90% of this site is link worthy because it offers so much useful content for free.

5. www.useit.com
This site breaks quite a few rules. For example, it looks ugly and the content is updated irregularly, however, when it is updated, more often than not it has something new to say about website usability that anyone can apply to their website, and it is free.

6. http://inside.123-reg.co.uk/archives/chris-anderson-free-long-tail
I couldn’t resist adding this one , but I honestly believe it is a good example of using an interview with an industry insider/ leading voice to generate interest, traffic and links. It worked for us!

Do you have any other examples of great link bait? Has anything on your website brought you a ton of traffic? Leave a comment to let us know.

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We’ve spotted a couple of domain name stories in the last couple of days, both of which contain some salutory lessons for website owners and anyone who’s ever bought stuff online.

GMTV website disappears

Regular readers will be aware that every now and then we stumble across a story of a high-profile brand or company losing control of their domain name expiring. This generally results in a well know website going offline for a bit. It’s previously happened to Emirates and Comcast.

This time, The Register is reporting that the GMTV website was briefly replaced yesterday by a page containing links to other websites. It looks like this happened because the domain name gm.tv was allowed to expire. The GMTV site apparently returned to normal once the domain renewal had been paid for. Read the rest of this entry »

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