The Russian extension, .РФ, is expected to be transferred to Russia in late March. Russia’s eagerness to move forward with this process quickly was apparent ever since the country filed an application for this IDN TLD just hours after applications were first accepted on November 16, 2009. The director overseeing the .РФ TLD, Andrei Kolesnikov, [...]
One of the leaders in beating Captchas is XRumer. XRumer is a spam tool that posts comments in forums or on blogs. The point of XRumer is to saturate forums and blogs with spammy links to “Site A” in order to increase the search engine rank of “Site A.” XRumer reportedly can even defeat the [...]
The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) has asked ICANN to postpone a decision on the “Expressions of Interest” (EOI) process for new gTLDs until after the ICANN Nairobi Meeting, which begins on March 7, 2010. The news was first reported by DomainNameWire, which cited a letter in which the GAC Chairman Janis Karklins said that the [...]
A friend of mine who works on a search engine startup was curious to hear about my interest in domain investing. After learning that I made substantial investments in the field, he smiled as he asked, “won’t domain names decrease in value over time as web users rely more on search and less on type [...]
On a recent Google webmaster thread here, a Google employee wrote the following response to an IDN owner who was trying to develop his site: “For us, domain names in Punycode are equivalent to their Unicode versions. In general, browsers prefer to show the real name, while internally using Punycode (as is required to access [...]
According to the New York Times, in 2009, 44.1% of ad clicks in Vietnam were fraudulent, whereas 25.8% of clicks in the United States were attributable to click fraud. If you were an advertiser who wanted to advertise in both places, where would you pay more per click? The U.S. of course. However, many companies [...]
Chinese IDNs were released in the .org extension this past week for the first time. The initial results have come out with both Dynadot and Name.com securing the bulk of the premium IDN .org names (see here). It is worth noting that though this is a Chinese IDN .org landrush, also available for registration are [...]
Zak Muscovitch led a panel that discussed questionable trademark related decisions. Zak earned a huge victory for the domaining community as the lawyer in the Groovle v. Google case. Michael Berkens discusses the negatives of the SmoothMove.com decision, which finds it to be bad faith to speculatively own a dictionary phrase domain if there is [...]
At T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Tina Dam, Senior Director of IDNs at ICANN spoke on gTLDs in general and on IDN gTLDs. She noted yesterday’s success with 4 .IDN ccTLDs moving forward in the Fast Track process. Greg McNair, another panelist, provocatively said that going to an ICANN meeting is “like watching paint dry”, though he joked that [...]
The afterparty shown above topped off a great first day of TRAFFIC. David Castello was full of energy and talent on the drums, and there was networking galore. A highlight of TRAFFIC was the panel on ccTLDs, which addressed IDNs as well. Rick Silver called IDNs “the future” while the panel overall spoke highly of [...]
