March 26th, 2008 Posted in Domain Parking
I wrote about an alternative to parking your unused domains over at my other blog at Theme Lab. Basically it goes over how to set up automated blogs with WordPress using RSS feeds. If you’re still parking domains at boring old parking services and want to develop your domains quickly, I suggest you take a look.
Posted by: LelandComments: 0
February 2nd, 2008 Posted in Domain News, Domain Parking, ICANN
Just a few days ago, the ICANN board passed the following motion to put an end to domain tasting, “THEREFORE, the Board resolves to encourage ICANN’s budgetary process to include fees for all domains added, including domains added during the AGP, and encourages community discussion involved in developing the ICANN budget, subject to both Board approval and registrar approval of this fee.”
For those who don’t know what domain tasting is, it is the practice of registering a domain, parking it, testing it for traffic, and deleting it for a full refund within a 5 day “grace-period” if the domain doesn’t generate enough. Various registrars have tasted and dropped millions upon millions of domain names, keeping only the good ones. More information is available at this Wikipedia article.
This decision by ICANN comes right after Google announced they would no longer serve ads on domains less than 5 days old, in an effort to discourage domain tasting. All of this recent action against domain tasting arguably has been sparked by Network Solutions stealing domain ideas, when they automatically registered any domain searched at their site in order to “reserve” it for the customer.
All in all I’m very glad ICANN finally took action, better late than never. An ICANN study revealed that 95% of domain registrations during the month of January 2007 were accounted for by just 10 organizations. This totals up to 45,450,897 out of 47,824,131 discarded domains. These practices were truly getting out of control.
Posted by: LelandComments: 0