Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

After pretty much analyzing the prospects of ICANN’s latest TLD – .tel – in my previous three installments, I was patiently waiting for the “free for all” day – March 24 – the day that hordes of lemmings will jump from the high cliff onto this amazing new investment opportunity. Or not.

However, a lengthy comment left at Part 1 of the series by a gentleman named Hanz made me dig a little deeper, just barely below the surface of the .tel propaganda machine.

Hanz, who seems to promote a variety of pills for every disease from his web site, pills.tel, argued on the popularity of .tel domains as seen by Google. For example’s sake, he quoted a company called “Largeco” and that out of millions of results for “Largeco” their .tel domain is #1 in Google.

We’ll see how high Largeco ranks, after my blog post gets syndicated onto Google.

I understand that Hanz chose pills.tel as his only chance to obtain a generic keyword unavailable in any other major TLD – not without paying a few thousand bucks for it. But in doing so, he chose the most unattractive and downright spamalicious TLD to build his linkfarm onto. Hanz, I’ve seen some ugly “viagra” web sites but this one beats them all. No offense, that’s the nature of the .tel beast.

Onto the subject of “Largeco.tel” that Hanz said comes #1 in Google, when searching for “Largeco”.

First of all, it appears that “Largeco” and Largeco.com are owned by Yahoo and are being actively monitored by Mark Monitor for trademark enforcement. So whoever registered “Largeco1.com” that is simply a link pusher for Largeco.tel opened up their options for litigation from the owners of the Largeco mark, Yahoo.

Here lies the “ingenuity” – or rather, stupidity, of the people who decided to register Largeco1.com and set up a page with a large image, depicting “The power of .tel” with a prompt to click on it and visit Largeco.tel

Looking up Largeco1.com at DomainTools shows that the domain is owned by “Benjamin Blumenthal”. There is also another domain hosted on the same dedicated server, which resolves to selma.nic.tel : Smallco1.com – In turn, Smallco1.com is used as a prop for smallco.tel

Nice SEO skills, guys. Using dummy .com pages to push the rankings of .tel domains that belong to fictitious companies. Makes me feel really warm and fuzzy about the capabilities in ranking for .tel domains. Not!

And the final straw:

Looks like Mr. Benjamin Blumenthal is the Director of Marketing for Telnic, according to ICANNWiki.

So there you have it, my friend Hanz: If you show me how high your pills.tel ranks in Google, I might give you some credit. Until then, I will assume that you were fed the same fairy tale as many other hopeful entrepreneurs that already spent $300 a pop for “premium” but useless .tel domains.

Had I known that I’d be writing part 3 of the .tel chronicles, I might have opted for Roman numerals, like Sahar does in his daily opus about “Accurate pricing”, currently at volume VIII.

As a new user of Twitter, I toyed around with this new gadget and recently found Twitter.com/dottel which is a placeholder for the twitters of two brains behind TelNic – Justin Hayward and Henri Asseily. So I started reading their “tweets” to get a better idea about what they’re perceiving .tel to be.

Justin owns Justin.tel so I typed that in and was forwarded to http://a1.webproxy.nic.tel/lookup/justin.tel where Justin has his “page” with contact info: his business and twitter URLs, his email, his coordinates on the globe pointing to a mapping system, his postal address and his hobbies and assorted “keywords”.

Now you know where the next generation of spammers will be getting their info from and it won’t be your MySpace page. Apparently, all this can be queried at DNS level – so it should be easy to create a data-scraper that uses the dictionary method to locate and extract this data. A spammer’s paradise (dot tel).

I am an enterprising domainer influenced by money, sex and power, so I typed Sex.tel in my browser and was forwarded again to http://a0.webproxy.nic.tel/lookup/sex.tel which looks like a rather unhealthy sized URL by SEO standards. I didn’t find any naked pictures there by the way, and you can safely visit if you’re that much bored.

What I did found at Justin’s twitter is a series of scary statements that makes me wonder how this .tel TLD was approved while .xxx wasn’t. Did it receive grants from European Union research programs that the naughty American supporters of .xxx could not have had access to?

How can you present this as a revolutionary thing and yet do this unmasked URL forwarding that the search engines such as Google will totally belch their bytes at?

Off to “Rik’s” blog – at Blogger no less: http://rikkles.blogspot.com where the apparently tech-minded TelNic person describes how “.tel is not a linkfarm“:

In a more general sense, link spam refers to linking pages for purposes other than semantic value, i.e. linking for the sake of linking because, for certain tools and services, the presence of a link is a Big Deal. Since Google first came out with the idea that links are more important than content for ranking results, everyone has started looking at links in a new light.

So, what does it mean for .tel? Well, nothing.

.tel is a publicly accessible distributed database of contact information, where each “node” of the database is owned by different people. This database is very structured, and allows each node owner to primarily store contact information, descriptive keywords and location (longitude/latitude). In addition, each contact info field in the database can also be encrypted using 1024-bit PKI.

“Rik”continues to educate the masses about this messy-looking URL in another post about “…Give me the standard behavior” in which he mumbles about cookies and proxies:

Here’s the issue as it purely relates to the Web proxy of a .tel, and it is mostly due to security features of cookies handling: When you hit for example http://henri.tel, you’ll be “redirected” to a server under the domain webproxy.nic.tel. The reason behind that is twofold: one, we’re load balancing with unicast to the closest server farm; and two, we have to move you over to the nic.tel domain so that the Telfriends cookies work across all .tel domains.

In that part, Rik’s trying hard not to tell us that there are still working on what to do with the fact that when you type the damn domain.tel, you are forwarded to a long-assed URL that neither you nor Google seem to like. And that’s about two weeks before .tel registrations open up for everybody and their mother.

There are several other gem posts in that blog that reveal how psyched these guys really are about their pet project, which is great to hear; and also why you should not spend $125 per year right now to register a placeholder in their database. Will it be worty to spend $20 in two weeks for a glorified electronic yellow page? It’s up to you to decide.

Will there be a fourth part in the .tel saga? I will have to see if Sahar posts part IX of his own blog series, then I might be challenged to catch up.

During the past few days, Ken’s been busy adding new features to his wonderful tool, ZFBot which now includes the zone files for the .net TLD, in addition to the .com. This brought the daily crunching to a whopping 92 million domains! Currently domains with no nameservers are not included but Ken is working on this as well.

Other great additions include the following:

• WHOIS tool: By double-clicking on the domain, you get a new window with the WHOIS output. Fast and efficient.
• Jump to website: Click on the little arrow on the left and a new window will open with that domain’s URL to quickly visit.
• Archive.org Wayback Machine link: Click on the “WM” icon and a new window will open with the URL of the Archive.org link to the domain’s history.

Now that’s what I call 4 tools in one! Don’t forget the Excel export option, that’s very useful in order to save your favorite research results to a file.

Ken is working on adding even more features now that the core code has been tested for functionality and data control, including a Google PR checker.

Stay tuned! Or rather, visit ZFBot and see what it can do for your domain research.