A new blog about domain names has been launched at http://www.domainnews.com/. Good to see some more sites covering this market. Excellent Domain Name.

Associated Cities interview Chicago.com founder Josh Metnick. Associated Cities is an organization for owners of city domains.

[via DomainNameWire]

Digimedia has introduced AJAX based PPC landers on some of their domains, for example cook.com and tile.com. The Tile.com lander also uses AJAX for the category breakdown.

It’s a nice design and especially in the search term breakdown the use of AJAX makes sense. Unfortunately the initial load is slowed down, so it takes longer for the sponsored search results to appear.

• Melbourne IT will auction off the domain names of clients who allow their registrations to lapse as it looks for new ways to broaden its revenue base in the wake of its successful bid for Queensland internet company WebCentral. [AustralianIT]
• .AX Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) Becomes Operational. .AX stands for the Aland Islands, an autonomous province of Finland, representing a cluster of 6,500 islands located in the Baltic sea between the mainlands of Sweden and Finland. [ICANN]

• Enom increases minimum Clup Drop bid to $60 [Email]
• Thousands of .FI names to expire in September [via GlobeDomains]
• Chinese domain auction yields more $160,000 [thanks Sal, CNN]
• Bypassing the Search Engine: Using Direct Navigation to Your Advantage [MarketingProfs.com]
• ICANN awarded net administration until 2011 [TheRegister]

• search.travel launches beta travel search engine [press release]
• AOL search data leaked (it’s all been traffic tested already) [slate]
• USA Today article on Google & iREIT [USA Today]
• A $4,200 domain purchase brings in $900,000 annually: UniCycle.com [Thanks Sal/UncommonBusiness]
• .VN opens to the world [via WebHosting.info]
• Jothan Frakes joines DomainSponsor [via DomainerMeeting.eu]
• Sedo launches new parking features [via TheWHIR]
• CNET added a *.com.com DNS wildcard, possibly inspired by the .CM wildcard, resolving to “search.com”, doubles traffic

• Domaining Session at SEO Rountable [SEORoundtable]
• Marchex, Master of it’s domain [TheMotleyFool/MSNBC]
• Marchex quarterly filings for Q2/2006 [Marchex]
• Traffic Testing/Domain Kiting threat in the UK namespace [PCpro/Nominet]
• Great Ad-Tech Presentation: Domain Power – The Value, Tools and Trade of Domain Names [Dan Warner/Ari Lee Bayme]

According to this blog post on Bob Parsons’ blog, GoDaddy has decided not to go public at this point in time.

[via BizJournals.com]

The operator for the .CM TLD (Cameron) has apparently activated WildCard DNS for all of their non-registered names and is displaying PPC advertising. What makes this different from
other ccTLDs that have done this in the past? Well, .CM is a typo of .COM.

[Update]: Judging from the IP address that the domains resolve to, it appears that this service is supplied by Hitfarm/NameView/GDEi.com.

[via ThreadWatch.org]

• HipMojo: Domain Parking: The Domain Name Ecosystem
• E-Commerce News: Developers Fret Over Domain Name Drought 
• CNN Money: A domain by any other name is not the same