Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

About 10 years ago I wasn’t fully aware of the domain world around me; I felt like a blind mole sniffing the cold air of opportunity at night. There was little, if any, education about what tools to use other than the rudimentary WHOIS at Network Solutions. To this day, I recall battling boredom by looking up domain names and confirming their availability, only to find them registered two weeks later. It’s no secret that Network Solutions spied on your WHOIS queries through their web based interface.

Today, it seems that there is an abundance of information and tools that allow domainers to perform real-time research. The rules of the game have changed many times over; the social integration of domaining has given information access to even the most remote countries in the world. There are also several events and conferences that are held – some of them several times a year – which bring more opportunities in domaining and development to their attending entrepreneurs.

During these ten full years, I’ve come across several different types of domain individuals; the domainer community is as diverse as the human race itself. For the sake of informative amusement, I’ve put together a few representative “profiles” that you might find interesting; some of you might even recognize others – or even, yourselves

The Domain Gods

Domain gods are usually quiet entrepreneurs that do not go public, don’t socialize with lowly domain “mortals” and rarely unveil an insight into their achievements. Usually, they end up selling large portfolios for ungodly figures; the mainstream media view these achievements as a sign of general entrepreneurship; to them, “domaining” is still a dirty word.

The Domain Socialites

Domain socialites are charismatic individuals that participate in public forums and events, contributing their time and knowledge with a charming pinch of spice; often humor is their elegant way to delivering their beliefs and strategies to those that otherwise are difficult to educate.

The Domain Poseurs

Domain poseurs come in two sub-species: the snotty achievers and the fake underachievers. Those of the latter kind have nothing positive to show in terms of  achievement; they promote and push a fake persona, never able to deliver any proof, any portfolio evidence or any records of success. It’s all in their head. Those of the former kind are one-hit wonders, who cashed on a big opportunity, only to turn snotty and nasty towards the domain community. They often re-iterate their single-win laurels until everyone realizes that there is nothing to be earned from their presence.

The Domain Newbies

Everyone has been a domain newbie once – with the exception of course of Domain Gods, that were born into the domaining game as divine entities. Newbies flood public forums with questions and astonished statements that savvy domainers faced early on in their careers. Questions about how to unlock a domain or if microsoftsoftwares.biz is a trademark are often responded to with a virtual rolling of the eyes in the form of a smiley. Smart domain newbies talk little and read a lot and soon they graduate to higher echelons of the domaining food chain.

The Domain Trolls

Your domains suck and your TLD sucks – because they suck. Hahahaha!

The Domain Flirts

Domaining is a male-dominated industry; few female domainers are active and able to demonstrate a continuous record of success, mainly because “the boys” don’t make it easier for them. In a world that sets glass ceilings to what women can rise to career-wise, domaining offers plenty of opportunities to mingle among the sexes. It’s just that some overdo it; often openly flirting with the opposite sex pool, in order to achieve certain goals with their charm. Domain flirts are both male and female and usually proliferate in domain conferences.

The Domain Maniacs

Domain maniacs do not rest a single second of the day; they research the news and only talk with their peers about anything related to domains. Usually, a domain maniac is a failed Domain newbie that decided that the best path to becoming a Domain God is through registration of hundreds of useless domains in every vertical and TLD imaginable. Very often, Domain Maniacs are banned from forums temporarily, only to return with more passion and having registered more domains in the latest fad of a TLD.

The Domain Gurus

Domain gurus are truly the essence of the domaining industry; they keep a low profile and yet are eager to offer their knowledge and information, either for free or at a nominal fee. They appreciate the attention and are eager to share their time constructively with all the other sub-species of the domaining industry. Often, they retire before the age of 40 and take a long Sabbatical in the Florida Keys.

The Domain Scammers

Domain scammers include two sub-species; the scamming opportunists and the thieves. The latter are usually young individuals eager to utilize their social engineering skills in order to steal domains of others and profit from them through monetization or reselling. They often reside in countries beyond the reach of International law; their modus operandi seems to be that of stealing from the Domain Gurus and selling to the Domain Newbies. If you see someone buying CBS.com at an online forum, you’re witnessing one such transaction. Scamming opportunists on the other hand, seek a long term approach to domaining. They deceive others by providing false stats, false promises and for small to medium amounts of money. They often take time to build their profiles and personas through elaborate work that sometimes deceives most Domain sub-species, except for the Domain Investigators.

The Domain Investigators

Domain investigators work quickly and without any reward, other than the glory of having nailed Domain Scammers. They identify, trace and locate the identity of scammers through the intelligent use of tools available on the Internet and offline. Often, they work in pairs or small groups in order to exchange viewpoints and information; once all the data points to a single direction they launch their offensive by publicizing their findings, unveiling the scammers and informing the victims about how to recover their lost funds or domain names.

It’s a beautiful domaining world that we live in!

On Friday, I had an interesting conversation on twitter with Justin Hayward, communications director of TelNic – the registry of the .tel domain TLD. For a person in an upper management position with the TelNic Registry, Justin came forth as being very defensive of his product, forgetting how twitter is a public medium. I understand that he was busy with promoting the .tel goods at Domain Convergence and getting ready for today’s TelCamp 1 in Toronto – a “boy scout” style convention organized by Canadian fans of this controversial TLD. However, Justin had no qualms about telling me to “go to hell” or that if I am not happy with my .tel domains I should “get rid of them”.

Someone hasn’t told Justin Hayward about leveraging Public Relations; he should take a hint from Sedo and how positively they recently responded to the porn ad fiasco.

Overall, Justin Hayward appeared to be unable to respond coherently to my main argument over disliking .tel and that being, that there is no possible way of real development for .tel domain names.  Instead, he pointed me to the rantings of some obscure coder – one of these technology neo-hippies that subscribe to the mantra of “code is poetry“. Not my thing – development in my book is not lines of code rendering text hyperlinks.

Let’s go back to what .tel offers right this minute, several months after its public release through ICANN – all while still in pre-beta mode; an industry first.

TelNic removed the bottom links that pushed the Registry’s contact info but they still maintain the large .tel button at the top right as a reminder that .tel and TelNic owns your info. It’s all about brand recognition riding on whatever you place in the virtual contact card layout beneath – just like WalMart would like to do to all the products you’d buy – if only they could.

TelNic introduced an API that allows programmers to customize certain functions of the underlying DNS layer, and you can conveniently store the info at a .tel domain to your Outlook. As far as I can tell, there is no syncing function that’d allow me to publish info in my Outlook to the .tel domain, instead of using a multitude of beautiful ajax-driven forms that code poets at TelNic have created. Too bad.

With regards to new innovations, there was an announcement of the introduction of an ad API that’d allow the placement of text ads and thus the supposed monetization of .tel domains. Now, thinking how what you view on a .tel domain is a large textpad  of 1994-era hyperlinks, that would make things look even more old-school, all while the large purple .tel button is the sole dominant graphic element on the page.

When it comes down to search engine placement, I did a simple experiment back in March, getting the .tel name of my CPA – he has a hard to pronounce .net domain – and entering all his info as a .tel contact card, with links to the live web site. After submitting it to Google, it’s still #35 in the results when searching for the name. Meanwhile, his obscure .net is still #1. Perhaps it’s the lack of any type of meta tags in the HTML generated by the “code poets” at TelNic; just view the source of any .tel domain and you’ll see what I mean.

The bottom line: .tel is a castrated TLD that was somehow allowed by ICANN to go live while still having unresolved technical issues. Their campaign through the media does not openly disclose that one cannot park, develop or host any web site on a .tel domain. Instead, the main push is for a virtual card that offers no graphic eye candy and no ability to remove the .tel branding.

In my closing statement to Justin Hayward, I responded that he would gain a lot of my support if they introduced a regular DNS layer that would allow .tel owners to develop their domains. It’s technically very simple; a code switch that would allow the current functions to give way to regular DNS resolving. However, as I told Justin Hayward, that’s going to happen when hell freezes over; for a company that supports the “code is poetry” motto that’s downright bizarre.

TelNic is content with the brand recognition and promotion, the same way that Abercombie & Fitch promotes the brand instead of the garment; and that’s too bad in the domain industry that has lots of attractive alternatives to offer.

There is something that I detest losing more than money, and that’s time.

Time comes in the form of dedication of energy, creativity and personal essence, to pursue or achieve something, or assist someone.

The amount of time dedicated to assist a person is tied even more to a number of personal events.

When these events get disqualified all of a sudden, due to an unlikely behavior that sprouts out of nowhere, then that’s when I get upset.

When trust gets broken.

Over the weekend, a legendary thread at DNForum.com unveiled that a person posing as a hard-working entrepreneur and domain broker, has been scamming people in the past, the present and – unless stopped, the future.

The tip of the iceberg broke through when someone did a lot of digging into that person’s past, which involved dealings with the law, broken promises and funds that were never returned to their rightful owners. The thread continued on with the contribution of at least a dozen people who unveiled what hid behind the smiling face of the person who has defrauded a large number of individuals at least since 2006 and who has 10 appearances at court over the past 10 years.

When trust gets broken, two things happen: the initial denial becomes anger, and the amount of trust available for the next person in line gets diminished. It’s like personal relationships that involve cheating; you don’t get to trust easily after that.

As I reported in my previous blog post, Sedo.com responded to my reaction towards their pornographic banner invasion, by removing the text referencing certain adult domain names for their upcoming adult auction.

In a nutshell, their amendment of the original ad retained the main image, which displays a semi-nude blonde seen from behind. This version of the banner was deemed borderline acceptable for the thousands of unsuspecting visitors to the offer pages of my non-adult domain portfolio, parked at Sedo.com, and for the millions of other domains owned by other Sedo customers.

Only a day later, on August 1st, I discovered that Sedo reversed the changes and re-instated the explicit banner ad, which contains the names of pornographic domains rolling over the image of the semi-nude blonde.

As of now, Sedo displays this pornographic ad on millions of pages of Sedo customers’ domains; visitors who want to place an offer or go through the sign-up process are facing an image and words which are completely incompatible with the average visitor’s definition of conducting business. The ad is *not* displayed on adult domains only, as it should have been the case.

Sedo has yet to comment on this reversal of a decision. Meanwhile, other vendors and publications that innocently pull in ads from Sedo, are displaying the explicit version – this is an image from DNJournal with editor Ron Jackson’s picture next to the Sedo porn ad. (image was captured from this URL)

Knowing Ron Jackon and his professional role in the domain industry, I am certain that he would not approve of this adult image being displayed next to his picture – if only he were aware of it!

This unexplained change leaves Sedo exposed as a company with a focus on the domain business and tarnishes the image of thousands of domain owners that are unaware of the pornography being displayed at the offer pages of their non-adult domains. Sedo has been advised to remove the image without any further delays.

Update:

Sedo has now changed the image so that it does not contain the offensive domains, for all English-speaking traffic.