Thankfully, because of the precipitous  valuation decline for most .mobi domain names, I don’t own a single one of them in my portfolio.

It’s surprising to me to see a .mobi advertised, and I was particularly surprised that high end champaign house Dom Perignon chose to use a .mobi domain name in its champagne display.  As you can see, Dom Perignon is directing people to Dom-Perignon.mobi, and the company isn’t even forwarding the url to a mobile browser-enabled website.

I think this was the initial thought about the usefulness of.mobi domain names when they were first released. Unfortunately, that potential does not appear to have been realized as many websites can detect mobile browsers, eliminating the need to use a .mobi domain name to provide visitors with a mobile-specific website.

The champagne house does not own  DomPerignon.mobi, which appears to be owned by someone in China. Perhaps they didn’t think it was worth spending the fee to try and get the domain name via UDRP? I suppose the barcode eliminates much of the typing and reduces the chance for error.

One of my favorite comedy movies of all time is Borat, starring comedian  Sacha Baron Cohen.  I recently learned that Cohen is starring in another movie coming out this summer, and I think the domain name choice is very interesting.

The movie is called The Dictator, and it looks hilarious (watch the movie preview trailer above). You might think they’d use TheDictator.com for the movie’s website, but that domain name is owned by Worldwide Media (Mike Berkens’ company), and it has been registered since back in 2003.

I don’t know if the movie producers reached out to Berkens to acquire this descriptive domain name, but they  are using a creative domain name instead. The Dictator (Cohen) likely lives in a fictitious country called the  Republic of Wadiya, and the movie website is  RepublicofWadiya.com.

Kinda neat to use that domain name, although spelling might be an issue. I can’t wait to see the movie this summer!

I read an article in the New York Times this weekend, and it seems like Klout is being used by people in some mainstream industries to get products and services in front of  influential  people. If you’ve never used Klout before (or haven’t heard of it), the gist of the site is that it tracks a person’s (or brand’s) “influence” via social networking websites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…etc).

I started connecting a few of my social media accounts to see where my score ranks on Klout’s 1-100 scale. I am not sure how Klout calculates the influence scores since it’s based on the company’s proprietary algorithm.

You can check out a  list of people and companies in the domain industry    to see where people rank, although many of them aren’t signed up on Klout yet. This likely means their scores are lower than they would be if all of their social media accounts were connected.

If I missed your Twitter account when I was adding people and companies to the list and you’d like to be on the domain industry list, drop a comment with your Twitter handle.

Sorry, Mike, I have to call the University of Florida out for this domain name / website / branding issue I saw during today’s football game against the University of South Carolina. During a break in the game, there was a UF sponsored commercial, and it directed visitors to a website to learn more about Gator Nation.

Instead of sending visitors to the University’s main website (either UFL.edu or UF.edu since both are owned by UF), and instead of sending them to the athletics department and booster website (GatorZone.com), the commercial directed people to GoGatorNation.com. Mind you it’s not the privately owned website at GatorNation.com, it’s GoGatorNation.com.

Unfortunately, the school doesn’t own Gators.com, which would be the ideal website. Incidentally, that domain name is currently parked with Frank Schilling’s Internet Traffic.

To make matters worse for University of Florida, not mentioning the football team’s loss today, but GoGatorNation.com isn’t even the main website. No, it’s actually a forwarder to a different landing page: TheUFAdventure.com. Even worse, all of this traffic that was sent to the website is being turned away. The site is still apparently under development. There’s not even an email capture form to tell people when the website will be ready. What a waste.

From my perspective, the public University should have used its allotted air time to direct people to the primary website, or perhaps a page within the website. It really seems the University of Florida has a domain name problem.