Domaining has been interesting me for a while. I think it mainly bugs me because I distinctly remember conversations from ~10 years ago about whether it was worth buying some generic .com domains that would be worth quite a packet these days. Darn it.

I don’t think the game is over, however, but it is taking (in my mind) two divergent paths:

1. the .com tld and most cctlds look to me more like the (real world, bricks and mortar) property market – with money to be made in clever speculation but mostly in development. Buy a nice undeveloped plot, develop it and sell it for a multiple.
2. new tlds, where it is quite hard to predict the future value of the domains (.biz??? please).

One area that is ripe for the picking in my mind is mobile. There has not yet been a winner in the battle for hearts and minds that is the mobile internet (m.example.com, example.mobi etc.?) but mobile domains have a few characteristics that are unique relative to the regular domain markets:

• shortness is (even) better
• all-number domains might make more sense because of the input method on many mobile devices

What am I doing about it?

Well, I spent a bit of time yesterday (yes, it was Sunday, I’m soo cool) writing a script to let me easily check the availability of some of the domains I’m toying with buying up. This highlighted a couple of issues:

1. I don’t have £150k. Any investors out there with that kind of money who fancy dabbling, I have identified a mobile niche you could pretty much own with an investment along those lines… Drop me a line
2. Automated whois queries are quite hard. Who decided that whois servers didn’t need to return information in a standard format? Nice one.

It’s not even easy to see if something is registered in an automated way (please, someone, correct me in the comments if I’m missing something):

whois -h whois.eu anunregistereddomain.eu:

Domain: anunregistereddomain Status: FREE

whois -h whois.dotmobiregistry.net anunregistereddomain.mobi:

NOT FOUND

whois -h whois.nic.tv anunregistereddomain.tv

No match for “ANUNREGISTEREDDOMAIN.TV”.

What’s that all about? Why not have a standard response?

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Happy new year everybody! Welcome back to the Distilled blog after our festive break

We’re all working really hard over here and clearing out emails and trying to adjust to not eating turkey anymore so I’ll keep this post nice and short for you:

I have been nominated as a Social Media Ninja and would dearly love your votes to help me win such a prestigious award (great idea btw guys! Hopefully this will become an annual thing). All you have to do is head on over here and leave a comment expressing your love for your favourite social media ninja (only if it’s me though).

Obviously most of my social media ninja skills go on under the radar (don’t all the best ones ) but if you need proof of my ninja skills you can read my entry for the contest. And lest I remind you of this post, way back in November all about ninjas AND social media!

moar funny pictures

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