{"id":86,"date":"2009-03-12T00:32:17","date_gmt":"2009-03-12T05:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acro.net\/blog\/2009\/03\/12\/fool%e2%80%99s-gold-part-3-its-a-mad-mad-tel-world\/"},"modified":"2009-03-12T00:38:45","modified_gmt":"2009-03-12T05:38:45","slug":"fool%e2%80%99s-gold-part-3-its-a-mad-mad-tel-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acro.net\/blog\/fool%e2%80%99s-gold-part-3-its-a-mad-mad-tel-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Fool\u2019s gold Part 3: It’s a .mad .mad .tel world"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As a new user of Twitter, I toyed around with this new gadget and recently found Twitter.com\/dottel<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Justin owns Justin.tel<\/a> 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”.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

I am an enterprising domainer influenced by money, sex and power, so I typed Sex.tel<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

So, what does it mean for .tel? Well, nothing.<\/em><\/p>\n

.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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. 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