How much is my domain name worth? Leapfish.com has created an automated free domain appraisal tool that evaluates the value of your domain according to TLD, search engine and archive listings, dictionary words in the the name, unwanted characters and domain length. Leapfish estimates the value of DomainEditorial.com to be $10,584.00. Of course that is way too little.

Apparently Marc didn’t like the results either.

[via Lifehacker.com]

• It is the week of the ever growing Targeted TRAFFIC conference in Las Vegas, so it appears that the industry is getting some of their news in a bundled fashion this week.
• LiveDoor, the company that had a lot of negative news due to possibly shade accounting practices issued an announcement from their Innovation Interactive subsidiary: They have release SiteParker, a domain parking system. It apparently is built based on the experience of serving advertising for their own 20,000 domains.
• Marchex purchased some assets of AreaConnect.com for $16 Million of cash and stock. While I am still not sure what exactly AreaConnect is (apparently it has 1 Million page views per month) it sounds to me like it would fit right into Marchex’ local strategy. The company also appears to have partner ships with yellow and white pages directories across the US and Canada, which could provide additional local content and targeted traffic for Marchex. (Press Release) While we are talking about Marchex, I should also mention that they did launch new page layouts recently (I like them) and actually announced them with a press release.
• WhyPark.com launched a new service that says that it’s not parking, but asks you to host your sites with them. You point your domain to their servers and set up the domains and corresponding keywords. A sample site is PCviruses.net. They charge almost $100 to get you going. I am not quite sure if this is a one-time fee, or an annual fee. Judging from the sample site the content originates from free article websites. Apparently they provide you with “hundreds” or “thousands” of pages of “fresh content“. There is a limit of 100 domains per account – they charge $99.95 in order for you to sign up for their service. You provide your own Adsense/YPN/AdBrite code. (Press Release)
• Bulkregister re-discovers their market niche and give it a name with this press release: Domainers. They have introduced “Magic Folders”, which allow you to sort your names in different folders and connect those folders with specific attributes, such as different nameservers, whois information or the like.
• Meanwhile Ben Edelman who told us how Spyware generates fake clicks shows us a possible use for his research in being the lawyer for a law suit against Yahoo!. (PDF of the suit)
• With all of these news we are all looking for a new forum to discuss all of this. And along comes DN Fish. Well, as long as it’s not DN Phishing, hehe. (By the way, dnphishing.com is still available.) Hardly any posts on there so far, though. (Press Release)
• Oh and yes, there are rumours about a cooperation between Yahoo! and MSN.

[via OnlineMediaDaily, ClickZ, SearchEngineWatch, Forbes, Peter Ejtel and others]

Starting from an old article (dated July 21st, 2005) published at Computer Business Review, (and following a more recent entry on GoDaddy’s Bob Parson’s blog) I would like to touch a bit more on the topic of ‘traffic testing’ or ‘traffic tasting’ of domains. This topic has been discussed at ICANN meetings since last year and is also referred to by the name of ‘add/delete’ or ‘add/drop’ storms.

Pay-per-click speculation market soaring – Computer Business Review

(July 21st, 2005): There are close to a quarter of a million domain names a week being registered for just a few days, while people “test” the traffic potential of those names before discarding them, chief executive Stratton Sclavos (VeriSign) told analysts yesterday.

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Microsoft fights domain parking with their new Typo-Patrol, which is part of their Strider project. In other news: Microsoft uses domain parking to up their web server count and gains on Apache and Bruce Perens launches OpenSourceParking in order to add to the Apache webserver count.

In a preview page posted by Microsoft Research, they show some information about their new Strider Typo-Patrol. Their examples show parked domains (parked on Google’s Adsense for domains / Oingo, Domainsponsor and Sedo). In their examples they start off by mentioning a concern for adult ads under typos of family-type domain names, such as disnryland.com, which now appears to have been changed to a child friendly parking page. To protect users from “typo-squatters”, they have released their “Strider URL tracer” in order to protect your privacy. They will even protect you from traffic counting tools like Hitbox, Google Analytics and Webtrendslive.

Thinking about the history of Microsoft, their end user agreements and similar items, it seems quite surprising to me that they are now interested in protecting my privacy. Well, at least they want to protect me from their competitors. If you look at the detailed targeting available to advertisers in their new Adcenter, you know that they also like to hold data about you on their servers.

While Microsoft’s project is drawing a lot of attention they fail to mention how many of parked domains are actually hosted on their IIS server. As shown in the April web server survey by Netcraft, the domain Registrar GoDaddy has just moved 3.5 million hostnames from Linux to Windows. Since GoDaddy is one of the cheaper registrars, I would imagine that they also hold many parked domains – especially since GoDaddy parks all new registrations by default. Ah, and yes, not to forget: If you use their DNS, they take the free to park any sub-domain that you have not created a DNS entry for – basically they add “free” Wildcard DNS to your domain and point it to their own parking service.

And more related news: Bruce Perens announced that he has launched “OpenSourceParking.com“, a service designed to boost domain parking on open source software.

The project is a response to a large gain by Microsoft in the April Netcraft survey, with Windows’ share jumping 5 percent as domain registrar Go Daddy moved 4.5 million parked domains from Linux to Windows Server 2003.

So in order to correct the domain parking stats in the favour of the OpenSource webserver Apache, Perens is suggesting for everyone to park their unused domains on his new service, OpenSourceParking.com.

The first use of funds will be for operation of the parking facility: dedicated servers, bandwidth, 24/7 system administration. These are not large expenses. Programming and web design are donated. Funds in excess of that will be used to help create an effective PAC (political action committee) for Open Source / Free Software. Because it will be supporting a PAC, this project will not be eligible for IRS 501(c)3 non-profit status. A not-for-profit corporation will be organized when there are sufficient funds.

[via Netcraft, ZDNet and OSDir.com]

A while ago Witek from Dotcenter.com in Poland contacted me and asked me if I wouldn’t mind publishing a little profile for his website. Finally I have found the time to edit some of the text he wrote. I hope that his tools prove to be useful to some of my readers.

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A new site has been launched which monitors forums that post domains for sale. While it is still in Beta, it looks like it’s working already. http://domainershub.com/. So far it collects posts from DNForum.com, NamePros.com, DomainState.com and WebHostingTalk.com.

whois.sc was renamed to DomainTools

 Our goal is to increase visitors perception of what we do. To more effectively communicate that ‘Domain Tools’ is a place for every type of diagnostic widget related to domains.

Our favourite whois site (iwhois of course!) has become even more… erm.. favourite?

Based on some suggestions (I was happy to help as well), Andrew created the ultimate whois bookmarklet. A part from looking up the whois of the site you are currently surfing, you can also highlight a word or a term on the site you are an and click on the iWhois bookmarklet.

http://www.iwhois.com/bookmarklet/

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. ThereÂ’s no spying, snooping, or any of that, but if youÂ’re security-obsessed this probably isnÂ’t the application for you. I have it running on my laptop, though.

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.