Sequel to :

1) http://www.bloggingindia.net/2007/10/23/domain-realtors-the-doom-of-the-internet/
2) http://www.bloggingindia.net/2007/10/25/domain-name-realtors-part-2-snip-from-washingtonpost-icann-sniffs-into-domain-name-front-running/

Hi all,
In my previous posts, I had mentioned how many establishments were realting domains (domain name front running). I had also examined how ICANN was probing into the issue a few days after my first post. Now today, I decided to focus on why this was happening.

This idea was actually pitched by Chip in his blog Chips Quips.

My anarcho-capitalist side says that the fact they can get more for the domain names means that the standard prices are artifically low — the same principle as scalping tickets.

That is something which we need to examine. Domain names are so underpriced that anyone can buy them these days. They cost only $8 and sometimes, even more cheaper. Anyone with a small Paypal account, or credit card, can buy a domain. It takes only around 1 minute to register a domain.

Thus, anyone can afford to do it. Since there are no explanations required, its pretty easy and uncomplicated. Thus, these so called domain name realtors can afford to buy domains in bulk - maybe around 100 or 200 domains…

Yes, the low cost ensures that anyone with a little tech background and low capital can enter the web market. But it also promotes such unethical activities.

So what can be done?

• Increase the price of the domain. But I don’t think this will be too effective since domains can’t be overpriced. Unless they are priced at around $30, the scam wont stop.
• Increase the investment required. This again will not help out low capital starters. This means that the domain resellers can put in a condition - a domain has to be bought for atleast 3-4 years. Which means a higher capital. Scammers wont be able to afford this.
• The best probable method is to restrict the selling of domains and transferring of owners. i.e. Reselling should be possible only after a specified time period, after buying the domain. The time period can be around 6 months to one year. This will pretty effectively spoil the activities of all domain name realtors and domain name front runners. They buy domains, and quickly resell them. They can’t wait for half a year! Especially front runners, who usually do their unethical business in a few days or a week. Meanwhile, it wont affect the low capital starters, since most of them keep a domain atleast for a year. After all, its just $8. But the domain realtors buy in bulk, and they cant have 1000 domains sitting idle for a year before they can sell them!
• And another possible, or rather add on, way is to introduce Explanations while buying a domain. The buyer should explain why he needs the domain, and for what purpose, and it should be approved by the dealer. Of course, if the buyer uses it for illegal purposes, he/she can be deleted, and if it was with the knowledge of the dealer, the dealer can also be dismissed. This will ensure greater security as well.
• Reviewing of the explanations, buyer address and buyer phone number, and buyer email address should be done.

Well, thats it from my side. ICANN, hope you’re listening out there!

Cheers, and please DIGG this post if you approve of the idea

Technorati Tags: domain name, domains, realtors, realting, ICANN, domain name front running

Hi all,
    The PCWorld reports that a faster version of the Universal Serial Bus ports are on the cards… Intel, spearheading the movement, along with other companies, are working together to promote USB 3.0.

    USB 3.0 is said to deliver 10 times the speed of USB 2.0. The data transfer rates for USB 3.0 are charted at 4.8 Gigabits per second (Gbps) (the speed of USB 2.0 being 480 Mbps).

Intel stated that the USB 3.0 specification would be optimized for low
power and improved protocol efficiency. The USB 3.0 ports and cabling
will be designed with both copper and optical cable capabilities,
meaning even higher speeds will be possible in the future.

    Intel has already unveiled a Wireless USB transfer format, operating at 480 Mbps.

    These improvements, as usual, will mean a lot of implications…

• USB 2.0 obsolete
• USB 2.0 cheap as hell
• Increasing dependency on USB… Maybe even for local networking?!!
• Damn fast pen drives!!!

    Hopefully, we’ll see USB 3.0 by next year. Cheers

Technorati Tags: USB, USB 3.0, Universal Serial Bus, speed, fast pen drives

Sequal to : http://www.bloggingindia.net/2007/10/23/domain-realtors-the-doom-of-the-internet/

From WashingtonPost :

Insider Domain Name Snatching Probed

By ANICK JESDANUN
The Associated Press
Wednesday, October 24, 2007; 11:51 AM

NEW YORK — The Internet’s key oversight agency is investigating suspicions that insider information is being used to snatch desired domain names before an individual or business can register them.

The Security and Stability Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers termed the practice “domain name front running” and likened it to a stock broker buying or selling shares ahead of a client’s trade, in anticipation of a movement in price.

In the case of Internet addresses, many people who see a domain name available the first time they check find it already taken by the time they return to buy it.

That has led to suspicions that someone with access to search requests has been using the information to gauge interest in a domain name.

By buying the domain first, that person can then try to sell it to the interested party for a profit. This is different from traditional domain name speculation because the buyer knows for sure that the address is of interest.

Although the practice has never been proven, the ICANN committee said the perception that it is happening “portrays an unfavorable image of the parties associated with the domain name registration process in specific, and of the domain name community in general.”

The committee said it wants to prevent “perception from evolving to accepted wisdom.”

The committee cited several ways front running may be happening, including the installation of viruses and other software programmed to collect such information and the use of unscrupulous third-party sites to check domain name availability. Coincidence also was cited as a possibility.

ICANN is trying to gather evidence on whether it is occurring and, if so, whether policies or other measures are required to restrict the practice.

—-

Just a couple of days after I posted about domain name realting, here we have ICANN digging into yet another highly unethical form of domain name realting. Did you understand what ICANN means by domain name front running? Lets compare a domain to land.

You dreadfully want a particular piece of land. You go and ask an agent if its for sale. He says yes, and asks you to quote your price. You decide on a price, and decide to sign the agreement the next day. The agent goes to another guy, who buys it from the agent immediately at a slightly higher rate. The next day, when you approach the agent, he says its already sold to so-and-so. You track down so-and-so and ask him if he’ll sell it to you. Remember, you desperately need the land. He says he will, and states an exorbitant amount. You get so angry, and you end up paying it, or closing down the whole business. Either way, you lose cash.

Now convert the land to a domain name. Get the picture?

Hopefully, this will be stopped soon. And hopefully, this incident will open ICANN eyes to other forms of domain realting. And hopefully, new rules will be introduced on registering domain names! Lets keep our fingers crossed.

Technorati Tags: domain, domains, domain name, domain name realting, realtors, domain name front running, front running, ICANN

Google vs Microsoft battle for Facebook.

And the winner issss……
Microsoft….

An excerpt…

    Thats an interesting point there. Microsoft does not indeed have a great history in successfully maintaining Web 2.0 sites. Yes, Live is a huge success, but not many users think so high of it… We’ll wait and watch shall we?

Technorati Tags: facebook, deal, microsoft, google

Good evening everyone,
    I will refer to today, as the Black Wednesday for Bloggers. Why? Google has started penalizing websites, mostly blogs, for putting up sponsored text links from their pages and posts. This is because a lot of cheating was going on, and the revolutionary Google Page Rank technology was being abused by websites.

    How PR works - Google Page Rank works on a system of voting. Imagine we have 2 pages, Page A and Page B. If Page A links to Page B, A gives a vote for B. The higher the number of votes, the higher your page rank. Now, PR is not just a factor based on the number of links. It also takes in to consideration the quality of such links. i.e. A link from a higher PR page causes your page PR to increase more than a link from a lower PR page. So if Page B gets a link from Yahoo!, it’ll have a higher PR than when it got a link from A. Thats the basic idea.

    What happened - Links are not easy to come by. Especially for slightly dodgy sites, like page names implying something, but having other content. Or for start up banks and mortage services. So what these guys did is, they paid websites, especially bloggers, who had the license to blabber about anything they wanted, to post links to these sites, either on their sidebars, or through reviews. Many get-paid-to-blog services, like PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and PayU2Blog, sprung up, and the advertisers made use of these services to get links from bloggers. These services essentially paid bloggers to post a review or a blog post about their clients, for a small commission. The links came in from all blogs - small and big, low PR and high PR, low traffic and high traffic. One of the nasty factors promoting this industry was Google PR. So these dodgy websites, which was supposed to have low PR because of negative factors, ended up with high PRs because of the link manipulation. Thus, Google’s search was effectively manipulated with money, and thus the search results were also manipulated.

    So, Google got panicky. A variable against their revolutionary and near perfect search system? No sirree!

    And they decided to go on the aggressive. Google decided to reduce the PR of websites and blogs, which they termed as link farms. Down went the PR of all blogs utilizing get-paid-to-blog services, and those blogs and sites which used direct text link services, like Text-Link-Ads.

    The bloggers have started feeling the pinch today. Thousands of bloggers are feeling the pinch, and are running helter skelter for answers. Duncan Riley, from TechCrunch, reports that even big blogs, like Engadget and Autoblog facing huge PR drops (Engadget went from PR 7 to PR5, and Autoblog from PR6 to PR4).

    Now these huge blogs wont feel the pinch too much, because they depend upon their huge established readership base, fan clubs, word of mouth marketing, credibility, feed readership, and community driven content networks (like Digg and Reddit) to sustain and develop their traffic and popularity. But smaller blogs, whose traffic is at least partially dominated by search engine traffic, mainly from Google, this will be a bit hit. BloggingIndia has not been hit so far, because we do not yet have paid links, but my other blog has felt the pinch.

    What will happen due to PR drops?

• Drop in traffic from Google, closely followed by drop in traffic from other search engines
• Drop in market value of the blog/website
• Drop in ad value. i.e. The amount given to the blogger for the displayed ad
• Essentially, therefore, a drop in traffic and monetary value of the blog/website

    Extracts from conversations in a get-paid-to-post service community -

• This is the most whack PR update ever. I’ve never seen ranks drop, and then drop AGAIN in a matter of 2 weeks?I found all of my blogs dropped again this morning. In 2 weeks, one blog went from a 5, to a 4, and then this morning is sitting at a 3. After being PR 4 for years.

• Mine went from 4’s to 2’s. Oh happy day…

• My PR5 blog is now a PR3. My PR4 blog went down last week to a PR3 and today to a PR2.

    Meanwhile, bloggers worldwide are going on a rampage against Google. The first I came across was by Beth, at AFrogToKiss. She has decided to stop using all Google services. She advices users to stop clicking Adsense ads, uninstall Google software like Google Earth, Google Desktop Search, Picasa, Google Toolbar and so on.

    From my part, I’ll say this, its our fault that we fell greedy to money and started putting up with such sponsors. We tampered with a system which Google thought was foolproof, which was bound to happen sometime anyway, and Google is plying for time, penalizing bloggers, while they try to develop a new foolproof alternative for PR, now that it has been proved that PR is biased. Yes, PR is very biased now. In their quest to penalize sites sporting sponsored links, they haven’t yet penalized the sites which sponsor the links. The actual fault lies with the sites which offered money in exchange for links. They should be penalized, not bloggers. So now, PR is biased with excellent blogs being given a low status. Before it was biased because of these excellent blogs trying to bring up not-so-good sponsors. It was biased then, it is biased now. But earlier, it was biased from the users side. Now its biased from the provider side (Google) which is a bigger bias than the former.

    Anyway, I don’t see any reason to stop using Google services. I find Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Orkut and Google Search indispensable. I find Google Earth the best of all services around. I don’t think we should deny ourself a host of great facilities just because Google penalized us for a mistake we should understand. But I don’t think most of the bloggers will agree with me.

So what will happen shortly? I expect I-Hate-Google campaigns to spring up. Blogs, petitions, email campaigns… the works… I fully expect to see an anti-Google Firefox plugin coming up in a day or two Google will have a massive negative PR attack. Finally, there’ll be a small dip in Google profits for the quarter, and maybe their stock prices, but in a month or two, its business as usual for Google, while its not for all the bloggers.

So what next? If you’ve been hit, don’t waste your time sporting anti-Google campaigns. Try and utilize the time to try and firefight. Remove the links, or bargain with the advertisers to have No-Follow tags inserted. STOP all viral blog chains, like Technorati Faves and stuff. Put your efforts into blogging quality content. And have patience. Google can’t do this for ever. And where there’s a will, there’s a way. Monetizing blogs has come to stay. There’ll be a way soon… And we’ll keep you posted on it…. Ciao…. And fingers crossed hoping that BloggingIndia won’t feel the pinch…

Technorati Tags: google pinch, pr downfall, google pr, massive pr changes, pr changes, google, pr, bloggers, sponsored links, link farms, campaigns, anti-google, payperpost, reviewme, text-link-ads, blogs lose pr, pr loss, black wednesday, why did PR lose