Home Blog Page 1321

DomainFest Global Ditches LAUNCHFest & PITCHFest Info Released

Elliot Silver
-
5

Back in November, I wrote about PITCHFest and LAUNCHFest, two new sessions that were scheduled for the Domain Fest conference happening next week in LA. I just received word that there will be two PITCHFest sessions in lieu of LAUNCHFest, and I think this is a smart idea.

PITCHFest was billed as an opportunity to present a five minute summary of a business idea that will “enhance the value of parked or developed domain names by driving increased traffic and/or revenue.” LAUNCHFest was billed as an opportunity for applicants to choose from a small group of Portfolio Brains (an Oversee.net company) domain names and the applicants would present a business plan to judges describing how they will build a business on that domain name.

I was critical of LAUNCHFest, as I felt it would benefit Oversee.net much more so than the applicants. I felt that the domain names that were being offered up for applicants to develop were overvalued by the company, and there really wasn’t anything rewarding about the deal for the applicant who wins.

The format for PITCHFEST will be as follows (adapted from an email I just received):

Four finalists will present in the first PITCHfest session on Tuesday, and another four on Thursday.   The finalists will be given five minutes each to present their product/service concepts.

Immediately after each five minute presentation, judges will be prompted for their opinion on the merits of the product/service presented.   A total of ten minutes will be allocated to the comments from all judges combined after each presentation—times are intentionally kept tight to maintain a candid, hard-hitting session.

Judges will rate each concept, assigning a score of up to 25 points in each of the following dimensions:

  • Creativity
  • Viability
  • Originality
  • Revenue potential

They will announce a winner at the end of each round.   After the second round, the audience can vote for the “People’s Choice” winner from both rounds.   Winners get a nice trophy, but more importantly highly visible jump start toward success for their new product/service.   And the audience will learn about new ways to improve their revenue.

Judges for the first contest include Frank Schilling (Name Administration, Inc.), Adam Rioux (Octane360), Eric Liaw (Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), and Ron Sheridan.

The judges who were originally scheduled to participate in judging the LAUNCHfest will now judge the second PITCHfest. They include David Liu (Jefferies and Company, Inc.) Douglas McPherson (IdeaLab), Richard Morganstern (Tech Coast Angels), and Ron Sheridan.

Our Story: Aliasing and Times Square

Elliot Silver
-
2


Starting backwards, you’d be stupid to put your name on a company and in a global press release if you didn’t believe in the concept.   When we took out an IDNTools ad on the iconic Reuters billboard in Times Square it was a sign of our confidence in what is to come.   Similarly, when we issued an international press release (link here) briefly explaining why IDNs will be the next big opportunity, we did so proudly with facts to back up our assertions.

So what are the facts?   IDNs are any Internationalized Domain Names that require the use of foreign characters, such as 溧阳.com.   The billion plus population in China actually prefers to speak Chinese, type Chinese and read Chinese. Now that they can register Chinese domain names, aka IDNs, they have been taking advantage of the opportunity and will continue to do so.   The same is true for Japan, Russia, and many other countries.   Unfortunately, IDNs became available after the domain rush was well underway, and as such many domainers and businesses still don’t realize that IDN.com’s can be registered.

But why would you want to register a URL that starts in one language and ends in English (i.e. 溧阳.com)?   This is certainly not fluid to jump from one language to another.   The retort is twofold.   First, Chuck Gomes of Verisign announced that IDN.com will essentially be “aliased” to   IDN.IDN.   This means that the owner of (Chinese).com will also be the owner of (Chinese).(com-in-Chinese).   There is much value in having an IDN on both sides of the dot.

Even in the interim, before aliasing, IDN.com domains are precious.   After all, .com is a worldwide brand and it is easy for natives to switch between a native language (for the IDN domain) and English (for the .com extension).   In addition, the search volume for an IDN, as measured by the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, is many multiples of the traffic can be bought for a similarly priced ASCII (aka English .com) domain.   For instance, shorts.com in IDN can likely be bought for the price of (insert adjective)shorts.com in ASCII (English .com), and the IDN would be a wiser purchase in terms of having higher search volume and less competition.

If you wonder, why others aren’t buying yet?   They are.   The volume of public weekly sales on IDNForums continues to increase exponentially, and if you keep a close watch on the whois, you’ll see many top tier terms have changed ownership over the last few months, indicating stealth acquisitions. Interest in dropping domains is also taking off as highlighted by the steep increase in subscribers to our IDNDroplist.

No doubt this is a complex niche, and a new reader must have many questions.   So ask them.   Ask them in the comments, email us or Elliot, and we’ll address them in the next post.

Next post: IDN Q&A

Aaron Krawitz of IDNBlog and Gary Males of IDNDemystified, are guest authors of this IDN series on ElliotsBlog.   Aaron and Gary co-own   IDNDroplist, IDNTools and IDNNewsletter.

Snoop Around and Access Someone’s WordPress Dashboard Panel

Elliot Silver
-
3

While doing some testing on one of my websites that uses WordPress, I registered as a subscriber.   Later on, while still logged in as the subscriber, I typed in the URL that I would have used as the admin, forgetting that I wasn’t logged in as the admin. Surprisingly, I was still taken to the back-end dashboard of the website, although I didn’t have the same level of access or ability to make changes.

Although there isn’t much (if anything) that can be done in the Dashboard as a subscriber, there is still a treasure trove of information that can be found. A subscriber can see the publisher’s post count, comment count, spam count, recent incoming links, and possibly most importantly, the WordPress version that is running on the website.

The reason it’s important to shield others from seeing the WordPress version you are running is because many WP updates have security components due to known exploits. If someone is behind on their upgrade, a hacker may be able to do something malicious with one of the known exploits. There are other ways to find out what version of WP someone is running (footer or source code), but many people prevent the display of this info by using a special plugin or coding to have it removed.

There is a way to prevent access to your dashboard, and it’s something I implemented already (see screenshot above). Under Settings in the Dashboard, there is a link for General settings. On this page, make sure the “Anyone can Register” check box is not checked and people won’t be able to register. If you do allow people to register, make sure the default is Subscriber so they don’t have other privileges.

Even if you don’t have a link displayed for people to register, they can use the standard registration url used by all WordPress blogs and websites (just substituting your domain name). It’s not terrible if someone gains access to your Dashboard, but I don’t think it’s helpful either.

Translating Domain Names

Elliot Silver
-
0

Using Google Translate to translate English to [another language] is the # 1 mistake that all newcomers make. This is a telltale sign of one’s lack of experience. If you crawl back through 5 years of IDNForums threads, you’ll see this mistake time and time again when new members post an appraisal. Mainstream machine translators are often junk for individual words, and a high % of the time they are wrong. Autotranslators are really only good for translating sentences/paragraphs so that you get the rough idea of the context. So avoid machine translations, though they are simple and tempting. Just don’t do it, especially if you are a newbie and don’t yet appreciate the odds that the translation is wrong.

So what is the best way to get a translation? The best way to verify names is to start with a list of foreign terms that you believe to be the correct translation. Then either use a native colleague or use a foreign dictionary. Many foreign dictionaries are free, online, and are just as easy to use as autotranslators. You just need to know where to find them.

To get you started, the gold standard for Japanese online dictionaries is Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC dictionary. The beauty of this tool is that it reveals the part of speech (i.e. noun, adjective, verb), and whether the word is Kanji or Katakana (which is a transliteration, and sometimes not the prime translation). My rule of thumb is that when a domain I want to buy is selling for $400+ I will contact a native translation agency to verify the translation for me, as the extra $10-$20 is worth it for a substantial purchase. Alternatively there are many native speaking members at IDNForums who will often assist. Networking pays dividends in the IDN community.

Next post: Our Story: Aliasing and Times Square

Previois Post: Diversify Your Domain Portfolio: How IDNs are Registered in Punycode

Aaron Krawitz of IDNBlog and Gary Males of IDNDemystified, are guest authors of this IDN series on ElliotsBlog.   Aaron and Gary co-own   IDNDroplist, IDNTools and IDNNewsletter.

Diversify Your Domain Portfolio: How IDNs are Registered in Punycode

Elliot Silver
-
0

You might have heard that people in other countries like to type, search, and create content in their native languages.   Investing in Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) is a way to capitalize on that trend, and for anyone who wants to diversify a domain portfolio, buying a number of IDNs is a must.

I am not fluent in any foreign languages, (though I come close with Hebrew).   How can I register IDNs in large countries such as China, which has more people than any other country in the world?   Is it a problem than I am not a native speaker and that I do not have Chinese characters on my keyboard?

It is actually fairly simple.   All you need is a good, free online dictionary and a punycode converter.

Step 1: Translation
If you use a reliable foreign dictionary and translate “Liyang”, the Chinese city,   from English to Chinese you will get 溧阳.com

Step 2: Punycode Conversion
Then if you want to register this name, many registrars require you to register it using the punycode representation of these characters.   If you copy and paste 溧阳.com into the IDNTools punycode converter, you can just press the convert button and you will get the punycode representation of this word xn--y9wq75f.com.

Step 3: Registration
Then go register xn--y9wq75f.com.   As a result, if someone types in 溧阳.com into a browser, you would own that page and can develop it like any other.   Even better is that IDN keywords are not as competitive so if one were to do SEO, you would be in a great position for the valuable keyword “溧阳”.

Step 4: Bulk Registration
Now that you understand the basics, you can still hand register some great IDNs, and the best way to check for availability is in bulk.   Pull together a few hundred English keywords.   Translate. Punycode convert.   And availability check.

Caveats
A few hurdles still exist, though they can be leapt over.   First, you are bound to make some translation mistakes as some dictionaries aren’t always accurate.   We’ll show you in the next post how to use the best dictionaries, and when to use natives to minimize mistakes.   We’ll also explain that the question “why would anyone register a foreign name, then dot an English extension?” is resolved by .com being aliased to foreign extensions.

Next post: Translating Domain Names

Aaron Krawitz of IDNBlog and Gary Males of IDNDemystified, are guest authors of this IDN series on ElliotsBlog.   Aaron and Gary co-own   IDNDroplist, IDNTools and IDNNewsletter.

Ski Club Loses Domain Name to Sex Toy Site, Doesn’t Blame Others

Elliot Silver
-
6

In the day and age where most companies and people blame others when they forget to renew a domain name (as is what appears to have possibly happened in Morehead, Kentucky), a Canadian ski club appears to have let its domain name expire and didn’t blame anyone else for the error. Unfortunately for Whaleback Nordic Ski Club, their domain name, Whaleback.ca, was acquired by a company   selling a sex toy.

As of November 29, 2009, the domain name was registered to a company called “Stag Lodge,” and the domain name was set to expire on December 1, 2009. On January 6, 2010, the domain name was registered to a different company. In an article found in The Western Star, the site’s webmaster, Jack Lamond, doesn’t go pointing fingers at others.

“Once you lose your Internet (domain) name, it belongs to someone else. That’s why you pay a domain name fee,” Lamond said.

It’s a shame the person in charge of domain registrations did not renew the domain name. As I always advise, ensure your credit cards on file are up to date, your domain names are set to auto-renew, and you check your emails from your registrar.

It appears that Whaleback Nordic Ski Club isn’t the only organization whose website was impacted by not renewing the domain name. A look at a cached page on the former Whaleback.ca website shows a link to a Stag Lodge Outfitters (StagLodge.ca), and that website now also has adult content.

That particular domain name was registered to the same contact as the Whaleback.ca website as well. Let’s hope he wasn’t responsible for any childrens’ websites or other important domain names.

1...1,3201,3211,322...1,558Page 1,321 of 1,558