For the past year, the company that runs the UK’s Internet registry has been the unlikely location for a corporate soap opera, complete with scandals, villains, twists and turns, allegations of corruption, resignations, grand plans thwarted at the last minute and some nasty in-fighting that had left people alternatively amazed, entertained and worried.
The dust finally began to settle in January this year when a second director resigned (loudly) from not-for-profit Nominet and ever since the management team has been frantically trying to tidy up. In an effort to avoid the same problems emerging further down the line, a big spring clean was ordered and an independent expert brought in to assess what had gone wrong and what needed to be done.
Last week, that expert – Professor Bob Garratt - delivered a surprisingly frank and blunt assessment. In it, he told Nominet – and Nominet’s members – that they had to sort out a list of issues, and they had to sort them out fast.
In effect, he gave Nominet three months to live. If the warring tribes can’t find a settlement before then, Garratt warns, the UK government is going to step in and Nominet as it has existed since 1996 will cease to be.
It now rests on the shoulders of Nominet’s CEO, Lesley Cowley, to make enormous progress within an extremely short period of time, and persuade groups that were until recently at war with another to come together and rebuild the organization.
Here’s what needs to be done and how Cowley says she is going to do it.
Twitter has just hit a crucial milestone for becoming a long-term viability rather than an Internet flash-in-the-plan: it has started generating its own sub-market.
Part of Twitter’s beauty is the fact that it restricts posts to 140 characters, forcing you to have to be economic with your words and making it easier to quickly digest others posts. The problem with the domain name system is that it produces long Web addresses (URLs) so if you want to point people to a certain webpage, you lose almost all the room you have just posting the URL, leaving little or no room for an explanation of why people should click on the link.
URL shortening applications have been around for years but they tended to be used only for ridiculously long web addresses that could often break in emails and IM messages. Twitter has given them a new lease of life.
And this was made clear this morning when the usual URL shortening site that I use - Tiny URL at http://www.tiny.cc - stopped working properly due to demand. The website wouldn’t load. More crucially someone Twittered me to tell me that an earlier link I had posted was now pointing somewhere completely different.
So I had a look about and found a new service: Trim, found at http://tr.im/. This has several advantages over Tiny URL. For one, it produces shorter URLs - the name of the game. But also it lets you lets you create an account, plus post directly into Twitter, and it provides stats on how many times the link has been clicked on.
So after 18 months of retaining my UK phone while living in the US, I finally got tired of paying £30 a month for absolutely nothing and killed the contract. It ends next week
Why did I keep it for so long? Well, for one, I didn’t expect to stay in the States all that long. I figured ICANN would drive me nuts within a year and I’d move back to Blighty. Plus I didn’t want to rely on just a work phone for contact with friends and family. And lastly I didn’t want to lose my telephone number - 07932 783686 - which I have had for over a decade.
Well, I am still at ICANN and so still in the States and I didn’t use my UK phone because to use it over here was prohibitively expensive. I don’t rely on just my work phone for contact - I mostly use Skype to contact friends and family. It’s free and it comes with pictures. And as for losing the number… Well I am the proud owner of a .tel domain name.
In fact, due to my name being slightly unusual, I have kieren.tel.
I think Amazon is fantastic. It is on the cutting edge of Internet commerce and it constantly pushes at the barriers… I’m a big fan of the Kindle - the first proper e-book; I admire Amazon’s affiliate program which is inventive and generous; but most of all, I love the way it has allowed booksellers across the world to tap into its enormous online presence, enabling independents to name their price and make books easily available that previously would have required a visit to the world’s main book repositories (in the UK that’s the Bodleian Library and the British Library at Paddington).
But I have to say I am foxed when it comes to what Amazon has to say with respect to my own book - Sex.com. While pondering getting a US publishing deal today, I had a look at Amazon.co.uk to see how my book was doing, whether it had any good reviews and so on.
Sex.com is out of print at the moment. So I was pleased to see it has been picked up by second-hand booksellers. The price wasn’t very encouraging though. No author likes to see their book offered for less than the paper it costs to print it on, so seeing Sex.com offered for £0.08 - or 8p - was not exactly exhilarating. But then what’s this - it is also on sale for £71.76. £71.76? What’s going on?
You know it’s bad when you start to feel sorry for the person on stage. Hal Bailey must have wondered what the hell happened. Coming to DOMAINfest Hollywood as the man in charge of AdSense for Domains, Hal was here to tell the assembled masses that Google was going to allow them to make money while sitting on their arses.
This incredible gift was going to come with some rules though: domainers would have to clean up their game. They would have to post original – i.e. not stolen - content on all the domains they owned, and they would have to provide a valuable informational service to their fellow Netizens. If they did that, they would find Google warm in their embrace; if they did not then Google would not help them and they would be out in the cold.
You can imagine Hal planning out this gentle lecture in his head before taking the stage with fellow Google employee Matt Parry: tough love but they would thank him for it later. It didn’t quite pan out like that.
Instead, the one-hour “Google Perspective: Winning over the Advertiser and Optimizing Site Performance through Analytics” was a lesson that Google executives would do well to learn from. Customers are customers and not just grateful users of services – no matter how much market share you have.
We first learned that the domain name market was far from stable around eight years ago when the dotcom crash turned a booming market into dust in just a few months.
Over the years, that market has grown in strength: its stability saw people invest in advanced systems for buying and selling domains, and the never-ending demand for Internet sites, coupled with the fact the the number of top-level domains stayed the same and so the domain space became smaller, meant that prices increased steadily to the point where tens of thousands of domains became worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Well, the DOMAINfest domain auction has just demonstrated that the domain name space may be more stable but it ranks alongside art, rather than houses, when it comes to property.
In short, the auction was a bit of a wash-out, with none of the 200+ domains available exceeding expectations; most hitting the bottom-end of their estimated value; and a very large number meeting no bidders and being pulled off the floor.
The big event at domaining conferences is the auction - almost like an online cattle show - where proud owners get to show off their biggest beasts and wait in silent anticipation about the huge pay-off.
I’m at DOMAINfest in Hollywood and it being Hollywood, there is some glitz and glamour to proceedings. The auctions people are dressed in tuxedos, swirling lights, a booming PA piping music and MCs, bars in the corners and excited chatter.
For an economy in the doldrums, the online auction market looks healthy (we shall see in a minute I suppose). There are 203 domains up for auction. No less than 18 of them are going for between $100,000 and $250,000; 4 for between $250,000 and $750,000; and no less than four domains with an “opening bid range” of over $1 million.
I’ll be taking pictures at DOMAINfest today and sticking them on Flickr - and possibly here - with a CreativeCommons license (free non-commercial use; accreditation required). The stream is below:
Today I’m at DOMAINfest in Hollywood. It’s the last day of a two-day conference all about the domaining side of the domain name industry - the sale and resale of domain names and associated websites.
Doug Brent, ICANN COO, is here to talk about policy issues and the work ICANN is doing this year - some of which is likely to impinge quite heavily on this fresh industry. But I wanted to come and learn about this aspect of the DNS and hopefully encourage people to get involved in ICANN.
So, if you are here and you see me, come over and chat. I’ll be here and writing blog posts throughout the day.
One day after the first announcement that angrily refused claims made in a resignation letter by former Nominet director Jim Davies, the .uk registry operator put out a second announcement covering in some detail why it believes Davies’ accusations are false and without merit.
The statement providing significant information about the executive compensation package that Davies had complained was providing the CEO with a large sum of money. It also deals with his accusation concerning the chairman’s role on the Renumeration Committee.
