Google Contacts Partners: We will Continue to Allow Adult Monetization of Domains

In a reversal of Google’s policy regarding Adult monetization for domains, Google is contacting its partners and letting them know that adult domains will continue to be allowed in the Google Adsense for Domains program.

“We are committed to maintaining a positive experience for end users and advertisers, in addition to partners. We have determined that continuing to allow adult domains in the program will be beneficial for advertisers and users, and our domain partners. In the coming months, we will continue to improve our policy on the technical implementation of adult domains, but we will continue to allow adult domains in the program for the forseeable future.”

Google was planning to have Adult domains completely out of the advertising mix at the end of May. It looks like they have changed their mind.

Poker.de Sells for $695,000 Euros

On the heels of Porn.com’s $9.5million private sale, Poker.de has been sold in the NICIT Auction for $695,000 Euros. This is the highest price ever paid for Germany’s .DE ccTLD.

PodcastHotel Speakers on Saturday

Today’s events at the podcasthotel are some interesting ones that you won’t want to miss. This is probably the highlight of the day for anyone that wants to tune into the live feed!

1:30 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
The State of Vlogging: What’s new?
How is the community evolving? How can artists get into vlogging as a way to promote themselves and their work? We will address how enabling technologies have changed the way we view and create video content online; are broader audiences ready? Will there be increased demand as with online video sites? How will this impact news distribution in the future?

Moderator:
Eddie Codel, PodTech and Geek Entertainment TV

Speakers:
Adriana Gascoigne, bub.blicio.us
Schlomo Rabinowitz, Vloggercon/CNET
Justin Kan, Justin.tv
Josh Wolf, The Revolution will Be Televised

Trump Loses Domain Name Dispute

A recent WIPO Complaint against “estore” a Brooklyn, New York company was brought up by Real Estate Tycoon, Donald Trump. The domain in question was TrumpFurniture.com and The Donald really wanted to get that name into his own hands. In a rare case of Donald not getting his way, the WIPO panelist, Douglas M. Isenberg ruled:

“The nature of the “other word” is particularly important where the trademark is not exclusive to the complainant. In this case, the Panel observes that the TRUMP trademark is also an English word with multiple meanings (including, for example, to “produce a sound as if from a trumpet”; “playing card in the suit that has been declared trumps”; “outdo”; “proclaim or announce with or as if with a fanfare”) and also a part of trademarks owned by parties other than Complainant. In light of the above, the Panel is not persuaded on the record before it that the Disputed Domain Name is confusingly similar to a trademark in which the Complainant has rights.”

It looks like one of my favorite businessmen doesn’t always get his way!

IDNs vs ASCII Domain Name Brand Protection

One thing that I see all the time lately is a company that has an older web 1.0 domain name like companname-fr.com or companyname.fr and yet, they fail to realize that the IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) version of their brand is still unregistered or even worse, it’s owned by someone else. IDNs are growing even more important for businesses, it’s really Local Search of Steroids, you have a person that speaks a certain language, searching from a certain location, and they already have certain expectations about the content that they find when they access the website. IE. if someone in Russia types in школы.com, they would expect to find information about “schools” in Russian.

I came across a thread at IDNforums that discussed this a little but, (it was actually about using “articles” like “EL or “L” in french names, but you’ll see where I am going here…

There are a few examples given where “articles’ are used in French domain names:
lemonde.fr
l-hotel.com
delamour.com

I want to take a closer look at l-hotel.com. This company does have a real usage for this domain as, l’hotel means “the hotel” in French, however this company, L’Hôtel, a large world-wide brand, fails to protect their brand from an IDN standpoint. Hence, take a look at L’Hôtel.com

– Now, if you’re IDN savvy, you’ll realize that the this domain is actually different, when it’s converted to Puny Code, www.xn--lhtel-7ta3296c.com. But the concept remains, if L’Hôtel really wanted to protect their brand, then they need to pay attention to the IDN version of their domain name.

Hotels.com
I will show you another example, and I’ll keep it very simple, but you’ll see that there are many more possible combinations than I use in the example.

Hotels.com owns hotels.fr - But, Do they own; hôtels.com (hotels in French) or hôtels.fr NOPE!

This will be a challenge for companies in the future, as they not only need to protect their brands from a .com perspective, but, in all CCTLDs and in close to 200 different languages. In many cases there may be several companies that can claim rights to the IDN version of a domain name and to a ccTLD version or a combo of the 2. Especially with generic words like “hotel.”

Venture Capital Activity: Technorati Buys Personal Bee, Akami Buys Red Swoosh, LinkedIN, Y Combinator

Technorati Buys Personal Bee

Technorati said Wednesday that it has acquired Berkeley-based Personal Bee, an online service which allows people to create their own personal sites using RSS feeds. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Ted Shelton, founder of Personal Bee, will join Technorati as its VP of Business Development.

Akamai Buys Red Swoosh
Akamai Technologies said today that it is acquiring San Mateo-based Red Swoosh, a developer of client side technology for media distribution, in a deal worth $15M. Akamai said it purchased Red Swoosh in an all-stock merger transaction, and that it will use the acquisition to augment its services. Akamai said that Red Swoosh will be integrated into its existing engineering team in California.

LinkedIn Claims 10M Users
Palo Alto-based LinkedIn, the online social networking web site focused on business professionals, said today that it has reached 10 million users for the site. The company said that it is currently growing at the rate of over 130,000 members a week. LinkedIn provides social networking tools targeted at business users, and has received funding from Sequoia Capital, Grelock, Bessemer Venture Partners, and the European Founders Fund.

Y Combinator is Breaking VC Ground!

The Mercury News has a good description of how Y Combinator works:

Here’s how it works: twice a year, Y Combinator invites “hackers,” or programmers, to fill out an online application, outlining who they are and a business idea. One winning batch of teams is funded in winter and the other in summer. With Y Combinator’s help, each becomes a real company - one that is expected to create its product within three months. The amount of money Y Combinator gives each group - $5,000, plus an additional $5,000 per founder - is a pittance for what it asks in return, which is, on average, a 6 percent stake in their start-up. That money has to really stretch. Beyond their living and working expenses, it must also cover relocation costs, as the winter winners must relocate to the Bay Area and the summer winners to the Boston area.

Why I Blog - Am I Crazy?

Thanks to Eric Hebert for tagging me in the latest Blog Meme game!

I’ll jump right into the 5 reasons of why I blog….

To Share Ideas
I’m a very strong believer in collaboration. Some of the best ideas or concepts can come from sharing similar situations or findings and then creating your own conclusions or solutions based on what other people have experienced. I like to share what I am thinking so that hopefully others will learn a little and share that with others.

To Learn From Others
It’s my blog, but you can comment too!!! - Some of the best ideas that I hear from other people come from blog comments that people leave for me after I make a post. Thanks everyone!

To Create Controversy
Do you every get bored surfing blogs with regurgitated content? - I sure do! I like to stirr things up a little bit when I can. It’s always nice to see SEO controversies in the blogging world!

To Be Credible
Everyone gets their five minutes of fame, but once that’s up, what do you do then? Well….how about blogging to get another 15 minutes of fame! Some 4 letter domain name comes to mind here, it starts with a “DI” and ends with a “GG”. All kidding aside, when you do SEO for several years, I have learned quite a bit and it’s great to share with others and build a small following of readers that look upto you and actually care about what you say. Rock on!

To Have a Little Fun
Blogging sometimes can be too serious, I like to chat about things that you wouldn’t normally see from an SEO/M Blog.

Alright, Time for a little Tagging!

Steve Alledia - Good Domaining Friend and Joomla Master
Tim Germer - PPC Pro and founder of NorthWest Noise
Frank Schilling - Blending Domainer & SEO worlds puts him on my list of marketing pros!
Earl Grey - Long Time BH Friend
Paul Madden - The SEOidiot

Friday’s Trip Around the Blogosphere

Kathy Sierra’s - Creating Passionate Users
You really ought to check out Kathy Sierra’s recent post about “outspending vs. outteaching”.

Is Google Acquiring G.CN ?

The China Search Engine View blog writes:

[W]hen you search the whois here, you may find there is one item more, “Registrant Organization: 北京刘元和君咨询有限公司” (Jan Liu & Associates), the attorney for Google’s case of googel.com.cn and googel.cn. Has Google really got g.cn?
This looks pretty realistic to me – and I must say that it’s an interesting branding play for Google China!

Speaking of Google – Aaron Wall has a great discussion about Google being and invisible hand in online marketing .

Aaron takes a look at the perception of trusted advertisers and how that affects your marketing spend and budget.

Their newest ad unit is an unmarked text link ad, which only displays any ad notification AFTER people hover over the link. Publishers who refuse to sell links directly will publish the ads, and if they spread anything like AdSense does, what happens to links to commercial sites? What happens when virtually nobody is willing to link to a commercial site unless it is through Google? What happens when their affiliate payouts are not high enough to solicit a review? And what happens to those businesses when Googlers decide they want that market for themselves, like real estate?

Verisign Raising Prices of .COM/.NET in October 2007

Verisign has announced today that they will be raising prices of .COM/.NET in October 2007.

This 7% increase means that Verisign will make an additional $27 million per year.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Apr 5, 2007 — VeriSign, Inc. (NasdaqGS:VRSN - News), the leading provider of digital infrastructure for the networked world, today announced, effective Oct. 15, 2007, an increase in registry domain name fees for .com and .net, per its agreements with ICANN.

VeriSign announced that as of Oct. 15, 2007, the registry fee for .com domain names will increase from $6.00 to $6.42 and that the registry fee for .net domain names will increase, from $3.50 to $3.85. This will be the first registry fee increase for .com and .net since the fee structure was put in place by ICANN in 1999.

Since 1999, the volume of Internet traffic and domain name system (DNS) queries on VeriSign’s global infrastructure has increased from an average of 1 billion queries per day in the year 2000 to nearly 30 billion queries per day today. Traffic volume continues to increase with the emergence of consumer-driven services, the surge in web-connected wireless devices and the proliferation of DNS-centric technologies and services. In addition, the .com and .net infrastructures are continually being fortified and scaled to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Security exploits have grown by 700 percent since 2000 and are projected to increase by 50 percent in 2007 and 2008.

To address the increase in both DNS volume and cyber attacks, VeriSign recently announced a major initiative entitled Project Titan to expand the capacity of its global Internet infrastructure by ten times by the year 2010. Under Project Titan, over the next three years VeriSign will increase its daily DNS query capacity from 400 billion queries a day to over 4 trillion queries a day and will increase the aggregate network bandwidth of its primary resolution centers around the world from over 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) to greater than 200 Gbps per second. VeriSign will also expand its deployment of Regional Internet Resolution Sites to over 100 locations across the globe by 2010.

Rick Schwartz Launches Blog - Domain Blogs Worth Reading

Rick Schwartz has launched his new blog, you’ll find valuable insight into how Schwartz runs his business and other domain related activities, including T.R.A.F.F.I.C.

In addition, there are 2 other blogs that you should check out to stay on top of the domain world!
Owen Frager runs a really nice blog with plenty of funky things to keep you busy while you’re working. =)

Frank Schilling is a top notch domainer that you should always be watching and reading to stay on top of whats going on in the industry.

* On a side note, the DNJournal released this week’s top domain sales, the top of the list is Greeting.com @ $350k - this one is from the last Moniker/TRAFFIC auction in Las Vegas.

Get Caught up on Search Marketing & VC

Kontrib Offers a Digg Alternative for Non-English Speakers

One thing that Digg lacks is foreign involvement due to the interface being in purely English. Kontribb offers the solution!

To submit and vote on articles at Kontrib, you first register. After you submit an article, Kontrib’s linguistic machines immediately translate articles into supported languages. These are Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, with more to come later. Kontrib is slick because it translates both the article summary hosted at Kontrib’s site, and the original article linked to. Comments are also translated.

Until now, language translation has remained clumsy. There are text translation sites such as BabelFish, or Google’s language tool. The coming Worldwide Lexicon Project promises to help bloggers translate their sites by mobilizing interested readers. Human volunteers will translate sites with higher quality, argues Brian McConnell, the project’s leader, and they’ll translate into any language. Though, we’d argue that human efforts will vary in quality.

What is FaceBook up to?

Recent traffic statistics at social networking site Facebook are impressive and we’re wondering if there’s a wider story here.

Facebook tells us the site is seeing about 1.5 billion page views a day, up from about 1 billion daily views last month — statistics that haven’t been released until now. That’s a huge jump.
Read more over at VentureBeat

So How Did you Learn SEO?
Here’s part of Rand Fishkin’s Story about SEOmoz:

“In 2001, the company that would become SEOmoz (at the time just Gillian, Matt & myself) began taking on some e-commerce development projects. Previously, we had designed static websites in Flash & HTML and done some consulting in usability, but with the addition of Matt to the team, we were ready to take on some beefier projects. We designed and developed several sites for clients and”

Rand over at SEOmoz would like to know how you got your start!

ZoomInfo - The HeadHunter’s Best Friend Expands

ZoomInfo today launched its Business Information Search Engine, a service that offers information on more than 3.5 million companies. Although the company profiles are similar to those offered by Hoovers.com and other subscription-based providers, ZoomInfo business profiles are free. More about Zoominfo at Search Engine Land

Matt Cutts Blog Hacked on April Fools Day

Ok, I was a bit surprised to see this nice little piece of hacking work done on Matt Cutt’s site by the DarkSEOTeam.

Click for the full size screen capture of Matts Blog:

Once you take a look at Matt’s Site, you’ll want to cruise over to the www.darkseoteam.com site where you’ll see the following:

Of course I’m lying when I make everyone believe that content is King.
Of course black hat SEO and spamdexing are the only Kings.
Google is just a stupid algorithm relying on spammy backlinks.
But you guys had no right to let everyone know. That’s why I defaced your bloody DST site. To show the entire world how evil a white hat can be.

In fact, I’m as evil as my employer
All your backlinks are belong to us !

Elaborate April Fools Joke? Or really good hack job?
You be the judge!

Tower Records Web Site and Trademark sells for $4.2M

A British Virgin Islands company has bought the Tower Records trademark and Web site for $4.2 million, according to a published report.

Struggling Tower Records has been sold to Caiman Holdings Inc. in a fierce battle with 4 other potential buyers. Caiman has said that they may open Tower Records stores in the United States and across the world, but not immediately. The brand of Tower Records is older than most may think, it was started in 1960 and even though you may never have shopped at TR, you know who they are. They really do have great brand recognition. If Caiman can put together a nice collection of complimentary services such as movie and music downloading with other entertainment content, they could really bring Tower Records back to be a force in the web 2.0 market.