All entries for June 2008

Biggest expansion of Internet Domain Names in 40 years starts new Land grab

Writing about web page http://www.icann.org/

A huge expansion of the domain names available on the internet from next year has been approved by ICANN.

The biggest change will be the introduction of non-roman characters for the 4.5 billion people who do not use our letters. This will take some time to sort but Russia, China and some others will be fast tracked.

Back in the English speaking world the land grab will start from Q2 next year. For a cost in the “low six figures of dollars” the wealthy, cities & speculators can apply for anything that is legal & decent. So Bill might try for .gates and Victoria may get .beckham. Big corporations might as well get their brand; search.google etc.

The real action will be budding domain registrants who hope to sell to many businesses with a regular strong income for their names. The most quoted has been .hotel but .music .movie .photo & .party could be early goldfields. The risk for speculators lies in our language’s diversity, with many synonyms and its rapid evolution. Will .health win over .medical? Will financial businesses need .bank, .credit and .finance? Will we need .birmingham for visitors to supplement .brum? Will it be .curry or .indian?

This spells the end of smaller countries exploiting the older two letter country codes as I touched on in the CCM Blog .

I feel sure that someone will think that the dreaded triple s of .solutions, .systems & .services will sell. They will be right but they will be selling management zombie terms; designed to be forgotten.

If one of your businesses main keywords is offered, especially if it is already in your brand (at the end is perfect) then consider buying.
If there is a plethora of choice then do your homework and test. You should test using £5 .co.uk domains before spending big on the new names.

My test results over two years have consistently shown that .co.uk will outperform .com for UK customers. This week I identified a local service market where this was not true, the .com won by 30%!

Scientific split-testing can take the guesswork out of web-marketing as I touched on in this post and in more depth in this article in ‘The Marketing Leaders’.
Sensing customers with pay-per-click advertising

Robert McGonigle : 27 Jun 2008 17:52 |  Tags: Domain Names Icann Split Testing Tld Tlds Web Marketing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Bajan Buffet, Atlantis Hotel & Ostins 'Fish Fry' in Barbados

Writing about web page http://www.mcgonigle.co.uk

Our visit to Barbados has been mentioned briefly on the family blog but the Flickr stream, left, has reminded me of one of the many food highlights.

The weakness of the dollar and the B$ meant that even the ‘international class’ restaurants at the Crane Hotel where we stayed were not so exorbitant. I preferred the older seafood specialist L’Azure restaurant to the new themed Japanese & Thai Zen restaurant.

The real bargains were well posted with the Bajan Buffet at the Atlantis Hotel, Bathsheba, Barbados recently well reviewed in the Telegraph . We went to the Wednesday buffet at under £11 and found all the food to be excellently prepared & presented with three ladies serving and keeping the food just so. I enjoyed a rare treat as they served roast blackbelly sheep. The meat of this goat-like sheep is popular across the Caribbean.

The Oistin’s “Fish Fry” is an evening tradition especially on Friday night. The fish are landed, filleted in the fish market and grilled in the open within a stones throw of the beach where you can eat marlin, tuna, shark, kingfish, flying fish, barracuda, dolphin fish and snapper. Our mistake was to wait until Friday because we could easily have eaten there twice. The prices made Coventry’s fish & chip shops look expensive. (The Oistins photos were loaded last and the Flikr links are on the left.)

My Barbados slideshow can be seen at www.hillfray.co.uk but be warned that this is best viewed on a good broadband link.

Robert McGonigle : 24 Jun 2008 11:54 |  Tags: Atlantis Hotel Barbados Bajan Buffet Ostins Barbados Ostins Fish Fry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Sites joins the Business set of Google Aps – Team Edition

Writing about web page http://googlesitesblog.blogspot.com/

Google are bringing together their collaborative applications into packages aimed at business. All the usual web-based tools are there; Gmail, Docs, Talk, Calendar and Home page. To this they have added Google Sites which can be used to create collaborative public websites and intranets. Sites emerged from Google’s acquisition of JotSpot and is completely different from GooglePages.

A first look at Google Sites reveals a professional look and access control but it lacks the range of templates, widgets and tools of the older GooglePages. It also fails, yet, to match the integrated corporate feel of Microsoft’s Office Live Small Business, MSOLSB. Google’s paid offer remains simple at £25 per year per user. The MS Live pricing model was discussed in this posting .

Google will catch up fast chasing the MS Live benchmark but I will not be recommending the Google approach until they can register, import and manage domain names as well as MSOLSB.
http://www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/video/sites_overview_video.html

UPDATE
Google’s blog sites, www.blogger.com , now have a domain registration partner as well as permissions control for up to 100 authors. This proves that Google continues to progress. Sites.Google has multi-users but no domain registration and Pages.Google has neither.

Robert McGonigle : 11 Jun 2008 16:32 |  Tags: Google Aps Google Sites Googlepages Ms Ol Sb |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem