Mosts posts you see on MaxPower have been crafted over a number of days (possibly even weeks). Sometimes the research takes a long time to complete, sometimes not. Still other times I just don’t want to write anymore on a subject and never end up publishing the post. What follows is a brief overeview of some of the stories that never got published and that I’m sick of seeing in the ‘Drafts’ pile. Consider the two shorts stories that follow kind of like blooging bloopers (except no laugh track).
Story Title: Do registrars snipe frequently checked domains?
Over on Digg, I read an anecdotal story about a guy who checked to see if a specific domain was available, found out it was but decided to wait to purchase it. At a later date he discovered that the domain had apparently been purchased by the registrar, sort of like an ebay snipe. Turns out that the story is dubious at best — someone else just registered the name, not the registrar. However, there are lots of people at digg purporting that the same thing has really happened to them. So this led me to investigate, do registrars snipe or steal frequently checked domain names?
Every day for about a week I checked ten fake domain names such as www.mungorgy.com, www.zetamagic.com, www.largeglasses.com, and www.smarmylovehut.com. Each of the ten was randomly assigned a registrar and every day I would go pertend to register the assigned domain following through right up until the payment gateway appeard. The registrars I chose included godaddy, networksolutions, namecheap, yahoo, sedo, and a few others.
On the fifth day of going through the process of almost purchasing 10 domain names through 10 different registrars I found one of my domains taken, largeglasses.com. Here is the WHOIS:
Domain Name: LARGEGLASSES.COM
Registrar: NAMEVIEW, INC.
Whois Server: whois.nameview.com
Referral URL: http://www.nameview.com
Name Server: NS3.PARKED-DOMAINS.NET
Name Server: NS4.PARKED-DOMAINS.NET
Status: ACTIVE
Updated Date: 16-feb-2006
Creation Date: 16-feb-2006
Expiration Date: 16-feb-2007
It was registerd by a company called Nameview
Nameview has one of the best and easy to use management solutions for large domain name portfolio owners, typically portfolios with over 500 domain names. It was designed specifically for large domain portfolios to streamline everything needed so that portfolio owners can be confident that their domains are secure and easy to manage. [via]
It looks like they provide some kind of privatization service to protect the identity of the true registrar — but the question remains as to who the real registrar is and why did they register largeglasses.com. I sent an email to the admin contact of the newly registered domain but I was never answered. After a couple of days largeglasses.com was available again (huh?) and I was no longer interested in spending 30 minutes a day doing menial form filling and link clicking and gave up the research.
Take home message: Registrars probably snipe frequently checked domains and menial tasks are boring.
Story Title: eZine articles are garbage
I recieved a hideous piece of spam promoting an article sharing website. Basically, you write something, post it to the site and anybody can use it as long as they don’t modify the content of the article. The rub is that (1) the article contains links to whatever the author wants; and (2) any splog in existance uses these articles to generate their fake content. This is an easy way to get your site listed as being in cahoots with the spammers within Google’s super mega allknowing database. I was going to write this huge piece detailing why all their claims were bogus, but in the end I couldn’t be bothered to turn my point form notes into paragraphs.
For example, eZine claimed that their advertising (by way of inserted links in content) was, “7-10 Times More Effective Than Regular Advertising.” Consider the famous advertising axiom by John Wanamaker, “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” I tried to figure out what 7-10 multiplied by half was and my brain started to hurt, all I know 100 * 0 is still zero. Then I gave up because the net is already filled with criticism and I no longer felt inspired.
Take home message: No matter what you write a sucker is born every minute.
Care to share any blogging bloopers?
20 Oct 06
11:58 am
One day last week, I was excited when I found that a certain domain name was available (I used Network Solutions to search). The next day, before I had a chance to purchase it, the name was registered by NameKing.com, aka Chesterton Holdings. After doing a bit of research, I found that Chesterton Holdings does this regularly and seems to be privvy to inside information that allows them to.
Exactly five days later, when they realized they couldn’t profit from parking the name (and, more importantly, just before they actually had to pay for it) they let the name go. While not illegal, this is awfully unethical and ICANN should probably do something about the practice.
The piece that shed the light on Chesterton Holdings and the subject of “domain tasting” for me is right here.
I’m happy to say that I now own the aforementioned domain name. If there’s a moral to the story, it’s this: Be wary of where you search for and buy domain names. Also, if your dream name is available, snap it up immediately or some nefarious organization will.