Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Only 10,559 LLL .tel domains left!

A new forum for both .tel haters & followers has been launched. TelSucks.com is open for discussions on the new .tel TLD, which is rather controversial in its function and usability. There are areas for discussion and for sales listings, link exchange etc.

From a domainer’s standpoint, .tel appears to be a gimmick that cannot be monetized using conventional methods, as you cannot park it.

The challenge would be to get paid for links on “portal” sites. Given the fact that you cannot use your own branding or even logo, the pages look like virtual contact cards with little if any “eye candy”.

Join TelSucks.com and debate about it!

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been one day since my last .tel registration.

Today I received the news from my CPA about how much I’ll have to pay in taxes this year. It will be much less than what I expected; just a partial “scalping” and not a full one.

My CPA is a great guy, well-educated and professional, able to tap into the resources offered by his industry – he’s always staying on top of new events and developments with regards to taxation and asset management.

His web site, unfortunately, is hosted at the domain name of his daughter – also a CPA – which also happens to be her rather obscure (German) first name. To top it off, it’s a .net

I thought about it and found a legitimate use for this – then went ahead and registered his easy to pronounce last name in .tel. I think he will be pleasantly surprised – once telhosting.name.com begins to resolve in order to manage it, as a quick pointer to the actual domain.

How many “hail Mary’s” will that be, Father?

The waters of “mass development” were hit by a major tsunami today, when news broke of a new, FREE bulk development tool that promises to deliver instant results. Seasoned web developer, Tia Wood launched the new service at BulkDevelopment.com

In her own words:

Want to leave domain parking? Don’t want to pay for MASS domain development? Our tool is FREE, fast and easy. Mass develop hundreds of domain names at the push of a button.

Newsflash: There is no “silver bullet” when it comes to web development. What has been the blurb of recent months and weeks has escalated to ridiculous claims from certain individuals that promise to develop “hundreds and thousands of web sites” en masse – all without having any such credentials and being unable to produce samples of their alleged creativity via a portfolio.

To truly get results from a selection of domain names, one needs to implement a well-thought strategy and entrust the web & graphics design only to skilled and qualified professionals. An exception to this paradigm, appears to be Rick Latona’s AEIOU service, that provides a streamlined process of quality designs aimed at domainers, at an affordable price.

The bottom line: Tia found a very creative and imaginative way to promote her web development services, while expressing her views on the subject of so-called “mass development” and I applaud her creativity and sense of humor.

It is sad that as soon as she launched the service, some hater clown left a message at her blog assaulting her creativity.

Any TLD that *forces* trademark owners to pay a premium price of $125 per year with a compulsory 3 year registration period, is a few cents short of a Madoff scheme. How many trademark holders bit the bullet and forked out $300+ bucks to ensure that their trademark survived the onslaught of this new zombie TLD?

.tel opened its registration doors yesterday, much to the delight of the salivating domain investors it managed to convince about its usefulness. Through its carefully promoted propaganda videos, which included alluring blondes strolling through the London commuter trains, TelNic is trying hard to conceal the fact that .tel sucks harder than a British-made Hoover.

As expected, when registration opened to the general public at 3pm GMT yesterday, most registrars failed to connect to the TelNic registry as hundreds of requests per second filled up the available bandwidth. I tried using Moniker, Dotster and Name.com – the first one failed miserably to even query .tel availability. It took two identical bulk orders for Dotster to secure my domains – that are still not resolving. Name.com was the cheapest at $8.95 per year and a very smooth registration process and sports a management panel that left me impressed.

So what domains did I register?

My trademark, Acroplex was the obvious one. Although I won’t be able to use it like Acroplex.mobi and redirect it to my .com, at least I will set it up as a “business” card. For the sake of this very blog, I also registered Acro.tel; then my last name, and by then I decided to experiment a bit further – all at Name.com’s low rate of $8.95 a pop. GraphicsDesign.tel was registered for me and VoiceTalent.tel for my brother, who’s a radio producer. I ended up registering a couple more domains to experiment a bit with SEO.

All in all, knowing that I’ll never be able to monetize, resell or build a real web site around these .tel zombies, I was content with my purchases. The ongoing argument about .tel’s usefulness has been turned into a well-placed PR propaganda from TelNic that has its followers and “nay-sayers”.

The best purchase of the day though, was when I registered TelSucks.com