As Antony posts on his Names@Work blog, DomainsBot released some new tools today.

Here’s a quick summary of the tools (from Antony’s blog). I would prepare a closer look at the details, but I have to get ready for my short trip to Vancouver.

http://www.domainsbot.com/labs/

• WordTrends — shows the popularity of keywords within domain names over time. Look at one word or compare several.
• DomainStats — Two in-depth studies that look at how length, number of keywords, and parts of speech affect value in the secondary domain name market, with surprising results.
• SearchCloud — An easy-to-use dynamic visual cloud that suggests new available domain names based on relations between keywords in existing domain names. Hard to explain, easy to use, addictive.
• Split-It — Is the phrase “domainsnow” really “domains now” or “domain snow” or “do mains now”? Split-It shows you all the possibilities and rates the results.
• Shadow — If you want to help DomainsBot produce more good stuff, download Shadow and it will use your idle time to crunch data. There’s no spying, snooping, or any of that, but if you’re security-obsessed this probably isn’t the application for you. I have it running on my laptop, though.

And here they come, the first lawsuits against the proposed ICANN/Verisign settlement. One was filed by the Coalition For ICANN Transparency (CFIT - what a nice name): CFIT - Press Release and the other one comes from the World Association of Domain Name Developers (WADND): Complaint (PDF).

Articles covering this topic:

• CNN Money: Battle over ‘.com’ domain continues
• Eweek: ICANN, VeriSign Settlement Challenged in Calif. Lawsuit
• Slashdot: ICANN/Verisign Sued For Monopoly Abuse
• CircleID: Lawsuits Filed Against ICANN-VeriSign Settlement
• Red Herring: VeriSign Sued by Trade Groups

As Yahoo! reports, ICANN is considering selling off single letter gTLD domains: Agency Weighs Single-Letter Web Addresses.

One could wonder about the motivation, but part of the answer is already found in a quote in the article:

Meanwhile, a handful of companies have asked ICANN to free up the single characters. Overstock.com Inc., for instance, prefers a single-letter brand of “o.com” because its newer businesses no longer fit its original mission of providing discounts on excess inventory.

Funny enough Overstock.com also happens to be one of the exhibitors at the ICANN meeting in Vancouver.

Ross’ posts Tucows’ position on the propsed ICANN/Verisign lawsuit settlement.

• Code :: Tucows position on the ICANN/Verisign settlement proposal
• ICANN Forum post

Tucows Inc. wholly rejects, without limitation, the Verisign/ICANN Settlement Proposal[.]

As reported by Domaining Blog, whois.sc recently added new languages to their namespinner tool: German, French and Spanish. Being German myself, I had always been wondering when someone would release a German Namespinner, considering the high amount of DE registrations.

I tested whois.sc a bit in German, and I think their main flaw still seems to be that the data is mainly based off previous whois lookups.

In the names@work blog, Antony comments on the business 2.0 article and also references a UCLA study: Names@Work » Blog Archive » 15% of all web traffic.

He poses the following questions:

1. How to distinguish between bookmarks and “type-ins”?
2. How many people type in a domain name into the search engine search box? I suspect many people don’t understand the difference between the URL box and the search engine box. Traffic counted as search engine traffic might in fact be domain name traffic typed into the wrong box….

1) This is going to be very challenging technically. In IE you can track when someone bookmarks you, because IE requests the little favicon at that point. If you can connect this action to future access from the same user (cookies?) you might be able to differentiate between the two. Mind, this would not work for Firefox, because Firefox always tried to load this Icon.

2) Many people - including my mother in law ;-) If you are the one operating the site, you will see it in the referrer URL coming from the search engine. You can also see this in the Overture Tool:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/?term=google.com

8941053 searches for “google.com” in the month of October across the Overture network.

I have always been saying it’s about time someone does a user survey and publishes the results. Or at least maybe some of the aggregators can share some statistics. I for one would be reluctant to give all my traffic (and the corresponding data) to an aggregator if I had other choices (meaning enough traffic to get access to an XML ad feed).

As if we would not remember the discussion’s about new.net’s alternate Root TLDs, a Dutch company thinks that there is a bandwagon to jump on:
Firm wants to rid Net of suffixes (Yahoo! News) [ed. Thanks to AT]

The company is called UnfiedRoot and asks ISPs and endusers to change their resolver’s settings in order to query their root servers in order to get access to ‘the whole Internet’.

In order to find out if they are planning on logging NXDOMAIN responses (for non existing-domains), I just sent them the following question:

Will Unified Root’s Nameservers be storing any queries for currently non-existing domains? If so, what will be done with that data?

This data could be used in a similar fashion as done by others before to register typo and generic domains.

(Hmmm, if you are editing a blog, do you send your questions ot the company itself, or to their PR agency?)

As noticed by Sheperd (thanks!), NetIdentity/Mailbank has added Icon categories and a search to their lander pages. If you are not familiar with their business model, they own many family names as domains and some generics and offer email and other services based on those domains. The services include email, hosting, blogging and additional domains.

For many years a lot of people in the domain/PPC industry have been saying that NetIdentity should PPC park at least some of their generic domains. I also noticed that some of their domains are actually now parked with DomainSponsor and just have a small header on top pointing to their product offerings:

Some domainsponsor examples:
http://zoologist.com
http://snowboarders.com
(this domainsponsor design always reminds me of the Digimedia sites)
http://deepsnow.com

A “normal” new landing page:
http://fick.com (ever considered putting German PPC ads on this domain ;-) )

I today’s National Post Mark Evans takes a look at Tucows and it’s investors. The article features a brief history of Mark Cuban’s investments and a profile of the company with headquarters in Toronto, Canada:
National Post: Tucows milking the Internet

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