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Info About .UK Domain Names

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After a period of  discussion, .UK domain names are being brought to the market soon by Nominet. We’ve all heard of the .co.uk ccTLD, and later this summer, people will be able to purchase the shorter .uk domain names. There are grandfathering rules in place to protect the owners of other .uk domain names, and once that is all sorted out, .UK domain names will be available for others to purchase later

I received a marketing email from 101Domain this morning, and since I am not all that up to speed on this market, I thought I would share the procedure and some of the rules the company shared in the email blast:

Grandfathering:

This pre-registration phase is for

ReturnMoi Rebrands to Return.Me

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ReturnMeAccording to an article on the .ME Registry blog, a company called ReturnMoi has rebranded as ReturnMe, and the company is now using Return.Me  for its website. The company had been using ReturnMoi.com, and that domain name now forwards to the new domain name.

ReturnMoi was founded in 2007, and the company reports that it has an impressive “over 80% recovery rate” on its home page. The company is based in Montreal, Canada, and it reports that it has offices in the US and Netherlands.  In a press release published this morning,  Suhail Niazi, the company CEO and founder, discusses why the rebranding was undertaken:

“ReturnMoi was our original company name. Due to our

Google Treats New TLDs as gTLDs

There is a thread in Google Product Forums’ Webmaster Central forum asking about TLDs being treated as generic. Although the question doesn’t specifically appear to be about ICANN’s new gTLD program, it garnered a response from a Google employee who mentioned the new domain extensions.

According to John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, “we currently treat the new TLDs as gTLDs, even if they sound like they may be region-specific (eg .berlin).” This is interesting to note, although I don’t believe it is unexpected. Mueller continued, “If, over time, our analysis shows that they’re clearly limited to only websites from those regions, that might be worth reconsidering. In the meantime, you should be able to set geotargeting manually for these TLDs.”

As you may already know, Google has a

.ME Contest: Win a Trip to SXSW

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ME Loyalty Program.ME domain names have become popular in the startup community. To help build awareness and brand loyalty, the .ME Registry launched the .ME Loyalty Program, and through this program, the Registry is holding a contest where the winner will get a free trip to South by Southwest SXSW Interactive Festival from March 7 – March 11, 2014.

In case you are interested in participating, I thought I’d share more information about the contest and how to enter for a chance to win.

What Is The Difference Between New gTLDs and Repurposed ccTLDs?

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There are many people in the domain investment space who are either opposed to the new gTLDs or are certain that the new gTLDs will fail. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this at all. Should some new domain names happen to be successful, there might be a missed opportunity, but everyone is entitled to their opinion and should invest accordingly, especially given the illiquid nature of domain investing..

One thing I personally don’t understand is how some people who are adamantly opposed to the new gTLDs are bullish on repurposed ccTLDs, which tend to have more value due to their generic nature rather than their demographic. For instance, .TV is far more widely used with video / television in mind than the island of Tuvalu, and .ME is used for the “me” connotation rather than in relation to Montenegro.

I have several friends who have invested in (and done well with)

.US Can Help Find Owner of a Domain Name

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Earlier this week, I was following a story lead about an interesting political domain registration. Likely because of the nature of the domain name, the .com version was registered under privacy since it was created, so the actual owner of the domain name wasn’t known. When a newly registered domain name is registered privately, it can be tough to learn the owner.

One interesting thing I noticed was that the primary domain extensions were all registered at the same time. The .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .us domain names were all purchased at the same domain registrar, which likely indicated that they were all bought by the same entity.

All of the domain names were registered privately, with the exception of