I went live with Salinas.com yesterday, and I wanted to share some information about the development process for those of you who have good names but fear developing them. First off, I would like to thank a few people who helped me develop the name and/or who gave me some fantastic advice on development. Without the help of Brad, Mike, Anna, Kim, Janis, Perry, David, and Michael, I wouldn’t have been able to build the site. I sincerely appreciate their help and advice. I have little to no technical expertise, so development is new to me.
In my opinion, Salinas.com is more of a mini-website than a fully developed site. Eventually I hope to develop Salinas.com into a directory site, but I am planning to test this development model first with Lowell.com – which should launch in the next 3 weeks. Although revenue is important, my current goal for Salinas.com is to increase traffic and provide a value for visitors. Revenue generation will be more important to me with the fully developed website.
Content is king for Salinas.com. I hired
Salinas.com Launch – Behind the Scenes
Potential Concern on Piece of New Legislation
I wanted to share a concern I have with a potential piece of new litigation sponsored by Senator Olympia Snowe and cosponsored by Senators Bill Nelson and Ted Stevens. The Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act (APCPA), which is being publicly supported by the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA), sounds like a consumer and business friendly Act, but I have a concern about an implication of some of the language that makes up the bill.
The goal of the bill is to protect consumers from “phishing,” defined as an “attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.” While this is something we would all like to see stopped, I believe some language in the bill may be detrimental to generic domain owners.
According to CADNA’s press release, part of the APCPA aims to address the “practice of using deceptive Web site domain names, which appear confusingly similar to well-known businesses’ Web site addresses, and may be used to facilitate phishing attacks and deceptive spam attacks, or to divert consumers from their intended online destinations to Web sites peddling unrelated or objectionable goods and services, including those harmful to minors.”
I am concerned that this is
DNN: Network Solutions Sued
According to today’s post on DomainNameNews, a class action lawsuit was filed against Network Solutions and ICANN by the law firm of Kabateck Brown Kellner. The firm issued a press release announcing the action earlier today.
This is the second article written by Frank and Adam today about Network Solutions, the first being an article about the company monetizing a racially sensitive domain name owned by the NAACP, presumably to prevent links like this from being displayed.
Spamming From Your Domain Name
People have asked me to speculate on why a domain name of theirs could possibly be banned by Google. There are many potential reasons, but an acquaintance of mined mentioned that spam related to the domain name could potentially be a reason for banning. From what I understand, it isn’t very difficult to spoof a spam email to make it look like it came from a particular domain name. If this happens and the domain name is put on a spam list, it could potentially lead to other negative ramifications.
One possible way to see if your domain name is being used for spamming is to create an email account with your hosting company, and have it act as a “catch all” for any email that comes to any email address associated with the domain name. While your inbox
Register Domain Names for Charity
Below are a few unregistered domain names I believe have good potential. Although I am not charging anything for researching these names, I am requesting that the person who registers each makes a donation to a non-profit organization.
JetMechanics.com
YachtMechanics.com
SpareMotorcycleParts.com
MotorcycleCustomization.com
MotorcycleCustomizations.com
PreownedDress.com
TradeGowns.com
DancingDirections.com
ExtremeMotorcycling.com
You don’t need to tell me how much was donated, but I would love to know which charity was helped, so please drop me a line after!
A few non-profits I recommend (with the link to make a donation):
Dana Farber Cancer Institute
ALS Association
The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure for Breast Cancer
Simon Wiesenthal Center
Meir Panim
American Cancer Society
Turning Point (Domestic Violence Organization)
BC Children’s Hospital
Charities Previously Helped By Generous Readers of My Blog:
The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
Simon Wiesenthal Center
Dana Farber Cancer Institute
ALS Association
American Cancer Society
Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
Mike Mann on Domain Tasting
Received this email from Mike Mann this afternoon:
“First off I have never done domain tasting, nor did BuyDomains.com when I managed it, and our new domain trading and building platform, DomainMarket.com, doesn’t either. When we and others first began thinking about it around 5 years ago it was bad protocol at best, and really considered a Denial of Service (DoS) attack against the Netsol/Verisign registry system since robots slam the systems to buy thousands of name at once; so it was against NSI/VRSN rules and possibly illegal too.
However once Verisign realized how many domains would ultimately be registered to their benefit (eventhough I imagine 99% of the inventory is never paid for and is re-deleted back to the unregistered pool of potential new domains) they decided domain tasting for 5 days to measure the PPC traffic and value and buy the statistical gems was OK.
However domain tasting is indiscriminate and buyers end up having their robots purchase other peoples’ clear trademarks, as well as a lot of lewdly suggestive names, or names that once resolved to questionable content. So again its nothing Id want my team to take part in.
In the past I thought nobody should do it. Today I think it should actually be done by others carefully for one simple reason: It’s good for the economy. People are typing in and clicking on legacy domain links for expired domains, and if they get a 404 error it’s a waste of time, energy and bandwidth – and nobody gets paid, however if it lands on a tasting speculators PPC page or monetizable site then someone is getting paid, and they can pay their employees, taxes, and tips at the local restaurant, etc. So domain tasting while lame in most respects is still good for the economy.
I’ve rethought this subject and I think it’s good for others as long as they don’t buy trademarks or domains that they deem offensive. Outside of moral considerations they need to be concerned about being sued or harassed somehow, which could have negative financial consequences, balanced by the value of the trickle down economics accidentally applied to attorneys and their caddies.
Thats all, LMK what you think. Cheers“