T-Error

As you know, over the last few weeks, I have been reporting on the rollout of the .CM ccTLD, and not a post goes by, where I haven’t gotten at least one, and usually several comments from domainers, to the effect that, all that the .cm extension is for, is to serve as a typo of a .com,  and its only value is from misdirected traffic.

So?

For years I have seen .com typos and misspells,  sell for thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars and not once did I hear anyone comment negatively on it.

Take the domain qoute.com currently at auction at Godaddy.com.  The domain is a clear typo for quote.com, already has 32 bids with a high bid of $755.  The domain according to Godaddy is expected to get over 1,000 visitors a month.

I would venture to say that no domainer has a problem with anyone bidding on this domain and owning it, although its only value lies in the traffic it receives from being a typo of quote.com.

Isn’t this the same industry that applauded the sale of the typo of Voyuer.com for $112K a few years ago?

Isn’t this the same industry that had several bidders, at a live TRAFFIC auction, bid up the price of the typo domain mortage.com to $242,000?

Assuming no trademark issues, why is a misspell of a generic.com fine with everyone but a generic .cm viewed in a negative light?

I personally see no fundamental difference between a typo .com domain and a .cm.

I think you either have to be in favor or both or against both.

Any other position is inconsistent.

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OK, I have had a gut full of people using the phrase “Premium Domain/s” to describe their piece of crap domain names!

Every time I look in forums or on domain blogs there seems to be some dickhead trying to flog their worthless domains to some poor unsuspecting domain newbie that gets sucked into the who “Premium Domain” bullshit. Excuse my French but this reeeeeeally pisses me off.
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Apparently I have been living under a rock lately (or maybe just working too hard) because I just recently came across this great Frank Schilling interview by Paul Sloan that I had not read before. Great stuff and well worth a read if you have a few minutes. Here it is:

Click here for the full interview in text form.

One thing that I found so very true from the interview is when Frank mentions the Greater Fool Theory. Many domainers rely on making money off of a domain that they buy/register by hoping that they can find someone who is even dumber/more speculative than they are that will buy the domain from them for an even greater price than they paid for it without even understanding or attempting to understand the underlying fundamentals of what makes the domain valuable (or worthless) in the first place.

While it is certainly possible to make money using that strategy there will always be someone left holding the bag (the “Greatest Fool”) and all too often that greatest fool turns out to be the first person to register the domain because they get carried away with buying a ton of .hype and .trendy alternative TLD domains or domains that just plain don’t make any sense.

Be sure to educate yourself on the fundamentals of what makes a domain name valuable and then do all that you can do find those type of domains. Whether its the tried and true value of keyword domains names or domains with type in traffic (for the most part one and the same) be sure and do your homework rather than giving into the Greater Fool domaining strategy.

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Oh common Google, not on a Saturday morning please (well at least for me it’s Saturday evening) Can somebody please explain the meaning of this logo which was spotted by the Telegraph a couple of hours ago on Google.com? The new Google logo doodle shows an image of a UFO. We all know of course that Google changes its logo from time to time whenever a special event is happening.

Last time I checked, there’s no such thing as World UFO Day. Or is it the  anniversary of the first sighting of a UFO by man? I don’t think so.

What’s so interesting about this unexplained phenomenon on the Google logo is the fact that it links to a search for the term “unexplained phenomenon” which is currently the top trending search terms on Google today together with the search terms “top 10 unexplained phenomena”.

So can somebody explain what the logo means? Or was it just a product of some Google engineers whose got nothing better to do on  a Saturday morning? Or is there something extra ordinary happening next week or in the days to come?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

What’s Up With the Google Logo Unexplained Phenomenon?

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There was a post a while ago discussing how and why to explore which questions people ask in your niche. We have agreed that it is invaluable information which is necessary to collect and analyze. So here’s another tool to add to your arsenal: Hunch. Here’s what you can do with it:

Hunch is a cool tool designed to help people make decisions:

Hunch’s answers are based on the collective knowledge of the entire Hunch community, narrowed down to people like you, or just enough like you that you might be mistaken for each other in a dark room. Hunch is designed so that every time it’s used, it learns something new. That means Hunch’s hunches are always getting better.

1. Browse related questions and answers:

2. Get more research and post ideas with inter-mediate questions
(They help to define the end-result)

In choosing what to ask you, Hunch’s question selection algorithm tries to do two things. First, it tries to find a question which will discriminate well among the remaining possible decision outcomes for you – thus filtering the remaining choices from “many” to “fewer”. Second, the algorithm looks for a question which can help optimize and rank the remaining decision results to present you with the ones you’ll like the most. It’s trying to ensure that you’ll like outcome #1 better than outcome #5.

3. Browse related topics to broaden the scope:

In any case, Hunch is a good place to go if you need more content ideas for your site.

The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Research Niche Questions with Hunch

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British Sky Broadcasting fails to convince arbitration panel of rights to SkyTravel.com domain name.

Broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting Group has failed to convince a three person World Intellectual Property Organization panel that it should get the domain name SkyTravel.com. The defeat is due in part to one of the arbitration panelist’s personal experiences.

Sky operates a travel channel called Sky Travel and owns trademarks related to the name. But the owner of the domain SkyTravel.com, which was originally registered by Ultimate Search and later acquired by the current owner, claimed that it is a generic term dating back to the 1920s. The respondent also has acquired trademarks related to “Sky Travel”. One of the respondent’s directors even subscribes to Sky Travel but swears he was unaware of the Sky Travel brand:

The Response exhibits a declaration by Mr. Taylor, a director of the Respondent, who says he has been a subscriber to the Complainant’s SKY broadcasting services since January, 2001, yet was unaware of SKY TRAVEL as a service or brand name of the Complainant until this Complaint was made, as were two of his colleagues; the Respondent acquired the disputed domain name in 2007 to use as a general descriptive term for travel related materials; the Respondent’s information showed that the term had a long history of use dating back to the 1920s in the United States; and that visitors to the Respondent’s website are predominantly from that country.

One of the panelists’ personal experiences were similar to Mr. Taylor’s. The panel wrote:

For the Panel to have come to a finding of bad faith registration and use of the disputed domain name, the Panel would have had to have concluded that the declaration of Mr. Taylor, to the effect that he and others within the Respondent were unaware of the Complainant’s mark when the Respondent registered the disputed domain name, was false. For one member of the Panel this would have been particularly difficult as he, like Mr. Taylor, has been a subscriber to Sky for many years and was similarly unaware of the Complainant’s Sky Travel channel/trade mark until he received the papers in this case (emphasis added).

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Related posts:

1. Leggo My Eggo! Kellogg Loses Domain Dispute
2. AAA Auto Club Loses Dispute Over AAA.net
3. Financial Firm Loses Bid for OVB.com

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Maria Göth of the .EU registry EURid was so kind to confirm the rumor we had reported on Twitter earlier: EURid will be launching .EU IDNs on December 10th, 2009. Details, including the characters that will be available for registration, will be published during the annual .EU registrar meeting in Brussel, to be held on September 10th, 2009.

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

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