Subscribe

Home Blog Page 1505

The Weather Channel May Be For Sale

Elliot Silver
-
0

According to Red Herring, Landmark Communications, the owner of The Weather Channel and all of its associated properties, is putting its Weather Channel assets on the auction block. The article referenced a $5 billion price tag that was suggested to Landmark Vice Chairman, Richard Barry.
I believe one of the best assets of The Weather Channel is their domain name, Weather.com. People don’t necessarily navigate to Weather.com to specifically visit The Weather Channel. They navigate to that domain name to get a weather forecast, and as long as its accurate, the provider of the forecast isn’t important. This is a category killer domain name, and it draws tremendous traffic.
According to Nielson/NetRatings reported in Financial Post, Weather.com received almost 33 million unique page views last November, which is more traffic than Facebook or CNN received that month. Additionally, millions of people look at Weather Channel widgets found on independent websites every month.
This is all positive for Landmark, and I would think several global companies would be interested in acquiring The Weather Channel portfolio.

Evaluating Affiliate Risk

Elliot Silver
-
0

Subscribe to Elliot's BlogThe New York Post had an article the other day about the plane crash that Travis Barker and DJ AM survived. As a result of the crash, lawsuits were filed against everyone from the estates of the pilots, aircraft manufacturer, tire company, and flight brokers. Just about everyone who had a hand in planning or executing the flight was probably named in the lawsuit.
One tidbit I noticed was from Clay Aviation, which said they didn’t operate the plane that crashed, but were the brokers for the flight.   That got me thinking about our affiliate websites and potential liability if something happens.   We live in a litigation-happy country.   People file or threaten lawsuits for anything and everything, and our websites could be exposed to even greater risk when offering products or services administered by other companies.
It’s important that website owners and operators evaluate the risk of offering other company’s products and services, and they need to take steps to mitigate the potential risk. Whether you would be liable for any part of an airplane crash that was booked on your site or not is something a court would ultimately decide. You need to be able to finance a defense, because it could be easy to be added to a large lawsuit.

Lowell.com Project Moving to Lowell.com Blog

Elliot Silver
-
0

After receiving a great suggestion from my buddy Adam Strong, I decided to move the Lowell.com Project development discussion to the Lowell.com website. You can find the newly set-up blog at blog.lowell.com. I just posted an introductory post on the Lowell.com blog, and will continue this project discussion over there beginning on Monday.
To avoid adding another blog that you might want to check every day, I will update this blog to let you know when I posted something new on the Lowell.com blog. I hope we all can learn together and gain from this experience. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback – both positive (and negative)!

Whois Lookups for Live Auction Domains

Elliot Silver
-
0

One issue that is sometimes cited for low live domain auction sales is the lack of publicity. I have an idea that may help Jay Westerdal’s DomainTools live auction and perhaps other auction houses who are hosting domain auctions in the near future.
If Jay would add a link to Whois lookups for domain names that are up for auction, he could inform the searcher that the name will be for sale. This simple tactic would allow domain investors and non-domain professionals to see that the name they just looked-up could be acquired in an upcoming auction. For example, if someone looks up Whois.sc/WireRack.com using Domaintools’ service, they would be able to see that the name is not only for sale, but coming up for auction soon. With Domaintools’ interface, they could sign up and place a bid prior to the auction without much hassle.
I don’t know the technicalities involved with doing this, but it doesn’t seem like something that is difficult. With all of the mergers, acquisitions, partnerships…etc in the domain business, I would think this could be done for other auctions using other Whois look up services. It’s a simple idea, but it could be impactful.
***UPDATE BY ELLIOT***
Just received an email from Jay:
“I would like to do that, and it will be done in 2008 at some point. However that feature is not done yet.“

Case Study: Register Your Company's Domain Name

Elliot Silver
-
0

A world famous chef is planning to open a new restaurant in a few months. This restaurant is going to quickly become one of the top restaurants (probably in the world). Out of curiosity, I checked, and the .com domain name of the exact restaurant name is unregistered.
Here’s the kicker… The restaurant group bought a different (shortened) domain name for the restaurant with a hyphen in the domain name. Guess what. The non-hyphenated name is unregistered.
Ordinarily, I would consider being a good samaritan and grab both names to give to them at no cost. The problem is that if I do this and can’t get in touch with the proper person, I could be accused of cybersquatting, as the restaurant name is not a generic term. Sometimes it’s just not worth taking a chance.
The moral of this is a reminder to register the .com domain name of your business before telling anyone the name!

The Lowell Project: Lowell.com Logo Unveiled

Elliot Silver
-
0

Lowell.com LogoAn important aspect of the Lowell.com website is the look and feel. When a visitor navigates to Lowell.com, the logo is one of the first things that will be noticed. When we were working on the logo concept, the goal was to create something simple but meaningful to the city’s rich history and current resurgence.
For those who aren’t aware, Lowell, Massachusetts is sometimes known as the “Mill City,” as it was one of the first and largest textile manufacturing cities in US history. The mill depicted in the logo is part of the Boott Cotton Mills, a recognized historic landmark and one of Lowell’s famous mills. The Boott Cotton Mills is now a museum, luxury condominium/loft/apartment building and office building. I believe the logo is symbolic of the great history of the city, and how it is becoming a hip place to live and work (especially in the artist community).
I am proud to publicly debut our new logo, and I look forward to the date when our site goes live sometime in mid-February 2008.

1...1,5041,5051,506...1,554Page 1,505 of 1,554
© Newspaper WordPress Theme by TagDiv