Geographic Domain Names

I was on a flight when I came across a .Vegas domain name “in the wild.” The Clark County School District (CCSD) is using the Teach.Vegas domain name in its marketing materials to recruit new teachers into the school district.

Have a look at the full page advertisement that I saw:

When you navigate to Teach.Vegas, visitors are redirected to the jobs/career subdomain within the Clark County School District website. The school district uses CCSD.net for its primary domain name, and the TeachVegas.CCSD.net subdomain for its recruiting url. In my opinion, the Teach.Vegas domain name is easier to remember than the longer url, so it makes sense for them to use it in their marketing materials.

As you can see in the advertisement,

The .Sydney geographic domain name extension turned one today. To date, over 9,000 .Sydney domain names have been registered, and according to nTLDStats.com, there are over 8,200 active .Sydney domain names in the zonefile. The City of Sydney Australia operates the WhatsOn.Sydney website, and there are restaurants, hotels, and other local businesses that use other .Sydney domain names.

According to a press release marking the first anniversary, “Sydneysiders can enjoy special birthday offers for a limited time courtesy of domain name retailers Crazy Domains, Melbourne IT and Netregistry.” People interested in seeing the special offers can visit Get.Sydney to register .Sydney domain names.

In celebration of the one year anniversary of .Sydney, I was sent some of the following facts and figures about .Sydney domain names. I would have preferred that the registry send me to .Sydney to see the extension in action, but for now, we can check this out:

The Boston Globe published an article about its sale of the .Boston domain extension. Minds + Machines acquired the majority of the Boston Globe’s rights to operate the extension for an undisclosed sum. According to the article, the Boston Globe “will retain a small ownership stake in ‘.boston,’ and the company will receive undisclosed future revenues.

Based on my interpretation of the article, it doesn’t seem like The Boston Globe management was too keen on operating .Boston. Here are a couple of outtakes from Hiawatha Bray’s article: