Via the remarkably inspiring HowToAvoidTheBummerLife.com

My how things change in just a few years. Today, AP reporters proudly proclaim their “investigation” of a security loophole on Facebook, describing how they used the hack to peruse materials that clearly were posted to Facebook with an expectation of privacy:

“A security lapse made it possible for unwelcome strangers to peruse personal photos posted on Facebook Inc.’s popular online hangout, circumventing a recent upgrade to the Web site’s privacy controls. The Associated Press verified the loophole Monday after receiving a tip…Using Ng’s template, an AP reporter was able to look up random people on Facebook and see the most recent pictures posted on their personal profiles even if the photos were supposed to be invisible to strangers. The revealed snapshots showed Italian vacations, office gatherings, holiday parties and college students on spring break. The AP also was able to click through a personal photo album that Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg posted in November 2005. — http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ijANq3fmx9AZNNrf7Q1PwCN1cKUAD8VK51UG1“

Just a few years ago, Adrian Lamo was hunted as a fugitive for justice for similar URL playfulness:

“Lamo has become famous for publicly exposing gaping security holes at large corporations, then voluntarily helping the companies fix the vulnerabilities he exploited — sometimes visiting their offices or signing non-disclosure agreements in the process. Until now, his cooperation and transparency have kept him from being prosecuted. Lamo’s hacked Excite@Home, Yahoo, Blogger, and other companies, usually using nothing more than an ordinary Web browser. Some companies have even professed gratitude for his efforts: In December, 2001, Lamo was praised by communications giant WorldCom after he discovered, then helped close, security holes in their intranet that threatened to expose the private networks of Bank of America, CitiCorp, JP Morgan, and others. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6888“

They ordered Lamo to pay $65,000 for so-called “use” of Lexus Nexus (even though the usage was on an unlimited plan) and 6 months home confinement, plus probation. Truth is, when he hacked the NY Times and exposed their sloppy-at-best online security, he demonstrated how unworthy the Times was of trust, and thus how foolish some very high profile people were for trusting the New York Times:

“…he penetrated the New York Times, after a two-minute scan turned up seven misconfigured proxy servers acting as doorways between the public Internet and the Times private intranet, making the latter accessible to anyone capable of properly configuring their Web browser. Once inside, Lamo exploited weaknesses in the Times password policies to broaden his access, eventually browsing such disparate information as the names and Social Security numbers of the paper’s employees, … a database of 3,000 contributors to the Times op-ed page, containing such information as the social security numbers for former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler, Democratic operative James Carville, ex-NSA chief Bobby Inman, Nannygate veteran Zoe Baird, former secretary of state James Baker, Internet policy thinker Larry Lessig, and thespian activist Robert Redford. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6888“

Today it’s not only OK for the AP reporter to browse around inside, but to write about it as if it were good investigative reporting. We only know what they tell us they looked at… they could probably have looked at anything on Facebook, which I believe, is why legislators made that sort of activity illegal years ago:

“Lamo has been charged in New York under Title 18 U.S.C. 1030 and 1029…The federal laws prohibit unauthorized access to a protected computer, and illegal possession of stolen “access devices” — a term that encompasses passwords, credit card numbers, and the like. — http://www.securityfocus.com/news/6888″

When my American friends discuss innovation, I often get annoyed at their dedication of passion to their uninformed opinions. If only they would put some of that energy into study, eh?

TechCrunch (today’s version of Red Herring, according to some lol) is reporting that “In Japan, half the top selling books are Written on Mobile Phones”. (I am not sure if this headline is a play on the old “In JAPAN…. ” jokes, like the original, “In JAPAN, the HAND can cut like a KNIFE!” but I appreciated it anyway).

So half of the top-selling books are written on mobile phones. Wow. Of course there is so much detail to examine behind that headline, but first let’s look at the story to better understand how this country labels pop culture pornography and how in this country big business stifles innovation in order to preserve the needed time to manage control of it:

With all the talk about Amazon’s Kindle, there’s a bigger revolution taking place and those who studied classic literature will be horrified. In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones.

TechCrunch cites a real newspaper, so we know this story is true:

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, mobile phone novels (keitai shousetsu) have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, “turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns and making their authors a small fortune in the process.”

I will assume that, IN JAPAN! they have mobile phones that work better than my $499 HTC/Audiovox/Verizon Winblows Mobile device, even if they don’t suffer the horrors of Verizon crippling for a mere $135/month over in Japan. They must, because otherwise, how could they write much more than a page or two before the battery dies, the phone needs a hard reset, or the screen goes too dim to even.. find the slider to increase screen brightness?

But I digress. There is more about what those popular “books” really are:

One book, Koizora (Love Sky) about high-school girl who is bullied, gang-raped, becomes pregnant has sold more than 1.2 million copies since being released. …. another book Moshimo Kimiga (420,000 copies) starting with installments uploaded to an internet site and sent our to “thousands of young subscribers.”

Well well well. In JAPAN, stories of teenage sex, rape, and brutalization sell. Imagine that! In this country, we don’t even count “adult literature” or even “graphic novels” when we cite best sellers. They don’t count (even if they do drive innovation, e.g. online publishing). Okay so maybe this Love Sky is not pornography, but it’s not great literature like our own best-selling-novel-of-all-time “Valley of the Dolls” either. Ooops. Valley of the Dolls is arguably the most popular (selling) novel of all time, but it does indeed address themes of “art films” culture in the 60’s. Hmm… but that was back in the sixties, and anyway, is this real literature or just scandalous text?

Regardless, the Japanese can buy stuff easily over their mobile phones today. Aspiring pulp fiction writers in Japan can sell their stuff through those same channels more easily than I can navigate my CCBill affiliate income reporting screen (no, I am not an adult publisher, but I did side step my way into one CCBill account a few years ago.. it’s a long story).

I think we’re still arguing about micropayments over here, far from enabling citizens to pay a buck or two to read some trashy text. Also the Japanese can upgrade their phones and phone plans and such as they desire to consume innovative technology. Over here, as a consumer unhappy with my 18 month old Verizon Winblows Mobile 5 device and willing to pay to get the latest stuff, I am offered a “new” version of the HTC with Winblows Mobile 6 that was actually announced last January, is finally available this month (late November, actually), and will require a 2 year commitment from me to the network plan with at best an 18 month upgrade cycle on the technology.

I’d have to be stupid to pay another $300 for another obsolete device, with a 2 year commitment. That’s a lot of money I could be spending downloading trashy novelettes.

My consulting business is increasingly receiving calls from overseas for Search Engine Optimization services. Wow… I’m World Famous now. I am an Internationally known search engine optimization consultant. In demand world wide. Or maybe it’s just because I’m cheap as hell with the dollar trading at less than half a British pound, and less than 2/3 of a Euro.

History tells us this country won’t wake up until the situation is very painful.

Someone emailed me today and called me curmudgeon-y. So I looked it up. Grumpy old man. Hah. I am not that old, and I am not grumpy. And I dislike that SearchEngineLand has labeled it’s hard-core SEO blog roll as “Old Fart SEOs”. I like appearing there, but I don’t like the label. Yeah yeah, all in fun. I also go this email today after my last post:

Looks like you’re doing everything possible not to get invited to the “select” PubCon parties

I suppose my blog is not as “SEOMozy” as many search industry blogs. I read this comment on SEOMoz today :

Showering love on a community is one of the best ways to generate a reaction - it’s a win-win proposition for the author and the readers!

followed by this:

linking out and praising the community is a great way to generate buzz! Some quality links there too - everyone should check out the whole list.

and this:

As to this being one of the best communities - I’m totally in agreement. Particularly as far as the signal to noise ratio goes - this community has the highest signal and the least noise in the industry. Both in the blogposts and commentaries.

Really? Let’s all just praise each other and everything will be win-win for all of us, eh?

Well I come from a background in real research and hard core Engineering (Big E, not little “e” like all those Google “engineers” and “software engineers”). Accountability is built-in, not optional. And when everyone just says “everything’s positive”, it sets that stage for complacency, laziness, and other tools of deception. If in fact SEOMoz is the highest signal to noise ratio search industry community alive today (a claim I do not make), it is surely not because of a stellar signal to noise ratio. It might be because the politics of the search industry prevent a truly high signal to noise ratio community from thriving. Is that win-win?

What happens when everyone is rosy and everything is great and we all pat each other on the back and say “good job!” and nobody is curmudgeon-y? Well, in the news this week we see :

Last week, the UK government announced the biggest loss of personal information in the UK’s history. Two unencrypted computer disks containing the personal records of all families in the UK with a child under the age of 16 went missing en route from the Revenue and Customs department to the National Audit Office. UK’s Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, stated that, “[t]his is an extremely serious and disturbing security breach.”

The disks comprised Revenue and Customs’ entire collection child benefit payment data. The disks were being sent to the National Audit Office using an internal courier system, but documentation of the transmission was not recorded or registered. The child benefit data listed on the disks includes name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and, where relevant, bank details of 25 million people. Revenue and Customs chairman Paul Gray resigned after the announcement of the breach.

That’s financial and personal data on every family in the UK with a child under 16, lost to accountability. Over 25 million people were legally required to hand over personal information and bank account information to their government, and that government shipped the data around unencrypted, unscheduled, untracked, and lost it. Based on the comments made by the government officials, including the one that resigned immediately, that same government assumes it is the hands of criminals. And the follow up is they plan to limit what they collect next time, but include your biometrics. Let me ask you this — can you revoke your biometric? Is it physically possible for you to get a re-issue of your biometric if it is stolen? And this will be better?

What’s going on? We can assume that if criminals wanted that data, it is valuable. The system keeps going, and you lose.

Complacency. Things are ok. It’s win-win. Everything’s good. That curmudgeon-y guy who was complaining  last year about having to hand over personal data for central archiving, with no legal assurances for protection? Just an old fart, probably.

A few years ago every complaint about Google was labeled a conspiracy theory. Posters who cautioned of trusting Google were labeled “contrarians” and said to wear “tin foil hats”. AdSense was buying webmaster loyalty for pennies on the dollar. Now, in 2007, things have changed. I won’t point to some of the available information sources I have now, because they are ridiculously irresponsible. Want to know every domain ever registered by PUT-YOUR-FAVORITE-SEO-HERE? It comes cheap today. Want to find out the affiliate tiering of PUT-YOUR-FAVORITE-AFF-MARKETER-HERE, with her upline and downline? It can be had for pennies on the dollar compared to its value. The public tools for competitive intelligence are a joke compared to what can be had through “channels”, and what Google has because you all give it to Google for pennies on the dollar.

But this is the competitive SEO/Search marketing industry. What about us?

Is it possible to knock someone’s web site down in the SERPs without their involvement? No, of course not, right? Everything’s good, everything’s ok. Good job all around. And when a business is knocked out and loses 65% of the traffic it had, what then? That loser should have diversified, right? Big mistake keeping all the eggs in one basket, right? And of course no accountability for why Google dropped the site. If your search marketing contract is worth $100k per year, and generates $1million in client revenue, is it worth $25k to knock you out?  That’s $100k in Chinese money, and much more in other currencies in locations where very talented people operate computers attached to the Internet. Services can be procured.

The majority of my professional work involves working with corporations that hired advertising and marketing and SEO agencies but soon found themselves stuck with unexpected dependencies, large bills, ill-defined contracts, and Internet performance below expectations. My work is very positive — identify the fluff, trim the fat, help the corporation find the loopholes and hold the providers accountable for the initial goals and objectives. It is interesting and challenging work, to say the least. If you are a search marketer or SEO chances are good that I am on the other side of one of your contracts, helping your client to help you do your best work, while they adapt to help provide you with what you need to do your best work. The goal is success, as it was supposed to be when you were hired.

So keep doing good work and working hard. In the mean time keep asking the hard questions, and reconsider how quickly you might be “rewarding” those in our community who “showering love on the community”. Word on the street is, there’s an agenda being played. Did you know?

The “honeymoon” is the initial period during which much is forgiven. The situation is new, overreaction is dangerous, and a decision was already made to “try it and see how it goes“. You aren’t usually thrust into a honeymoon — you decide to go there: you manage the risk. The web, from an SEO perspective, has been one big honeymoon. Is the honeymoon almost over?

There are many indications that the honeymoon for webmarketers has been fabulous but is finite, and it may be time to start planning the return to reality. Competition is heating up, and as I suggested in “Here Come The Domainers“, there is plenty of room topside for more competition. Post-deregulation domain prices are correcting, as the secondary market takes hold. SEO services are still hawked as “task packages” even though SEO is a process, but buyers are getting smarter. We have one search engine, and that entity has taken over almost half of the online advertising market it helped create. As Google exerts some of that power, we’re going to enjoy fewer freedoms.

One of the big areas to watch is the web development space. Most immediately, I’m seeing domainers stepping into development, and they have a lot to learn. Web development has advanced well beyond the HTML and CSS of domainer world, with frameworks and platforms evolving at breakneck speed behind the scenes. As is the case in SEO, what you read on the web does not represent state of the art or even close. Open source CMSs may look good, but they represent nothing more than a framework to adopt, often without adequate best-practice nor robust community support. Popular support is not the same as robust support. If you don’t believe me, ask how many opensource CMS adopters have read the roadmaps for the apps they adopted. Ask how many of those roadmaps acknowledge a “complete re-write” is in the near future. Too many. Can you afford to adopt a framework that is scheduled for a complete rewrite? Think of the developers… are they concerned with the current release or even the nightlies, or are they focused on the next great re-write?

I doubt very much the venture and private equity groups forming around domain portfolios are ready to swallow the salaries demanded by the capable PHP, database, and web app dev people (if they could even get heir attention). Those of us involved in web technologies have encountered those problems for years now. A hundred grand doesn’t attract who you need any more. Do domainers have the stomach to carry high-salaried technologists who are more capable of chasing the same opportunities as a technologist that they are chasing as a business? Equity is not interesting to most of the really capable people, and when equity does motivate, I find the guy evaluating the equity opportunity knows more about the web and web development than the founders, their investors, or the leads on the venture. Honestly, they are not looking so much at the equity offer, but the likelihood of their taking over the entire project or a significant portion down the road due to their virtual control over it. That does happen, just as it happens with the IP lawyers and financiers. To really succeed on the web today you need more than youthful passion and obligation-free creativity. You need wisdom, and like the really good diamonds on display in the jewelry store, wisdom’s price tag “ask for price”.

A long time ago when the web started guys like me questioned everything. It was stupid to do this, stupid to rely on that, stupid to trust this or that. But the web was in the honeymoon period, and we simply had to trust. Forget about 20 years of software business experience, we had to make progress. Client server taught us very little, because we had to have faith in the web. Now, as the honeymoon shows its age, the risks are showing more clearly. We’re seeing javascript loaded across domains, slowing down page loads sometimes at the cost of visitors, and skewing stats. We’re seeing services unable to keep up, yet still relatively unaccountable to their customers. Just yesterday an obscure blogger Earlier this month Aaron Wall wrote this:

A few weeks back I made a post about the book being a dying format, and in that post I have a Google book snippet. Within a week that snippet was broken. I had a Google CPA ad integrated into one of my major websites and the ad went away, breaking 10% of a large site and making it look like spam. Even some of the services that are not broke will likely be drastically different in a few years. Google maps is really open because they need marketshare, but after they become the clear market leader will they stay fairly open? How long until we have ads in everything? A good webmaster service that would be exceptionally useful is something that scours websites and looks for broken stuff.

Trusting Google for part of your page content and user experience? What does Google care if it fails to perform? Google maps has one of the most risky terms of service of any out there, yet young technologists forged ahead developing apps around it. They had to. But not to secure a defensible business. They did it to secure their tech positions. Now what will they do? Pitch you on developing Google maps applications using their leet skills? Are you prepared to evaluate and manage the risk associated with that Google Terms of Service which allows Google to shut you down at any time, for any reason, with no warning? the recent acquisiton of Navtech by Nokia should shake some boots. What happens to Google maps now? Or perhaps more clairvoyantly, when will Google acquire Nokia to secure navteq *and* the Gphone? Maybe it doesn’t matter for your gardening website, but if you’re Zillow, or an online yellow pages, this is quite significant.

There are plenty of signs. If you were registering domains back when they were $150 each you probably remember how stupid it seemed to pick the “authentication via email” option at the registrar. You were warned in great detail that email-based-auth was not secure, very risky, and should not be selected. Yet, what other choice did we have? It was far to difficult to manage public/private key encryption back then, and other alternatives we risky for other reasons. So in the end, virtually everyone accepted email-based-auth as the gold standard for domain registrations. And now? Because the whole system is based on an insecure protocol (email based authentication), criminals are stealing domains. The honeymoon that granted us freedom to actually choose a known-to-be-insecure option simply out of convenience, is coming to a close.
I think the honeymoon is almost over, but I also think we’re in for a wave of profit taking by the web technology people. Investors, builders, web real estate developers, and even consumers will yield to the technologists as they advance the underlying web infrastructure beyond even the rather complex levels it is at now, to levels well out of reach of most current web publishers. Innovation will get more and more expensive, and as the rest follow each other under Google’s umbrella, that innovation will yield more and more significant dividends.

Call it a bubble or call it a gold rush or a wave or trend, but the risk is increasing with that growth. Remember the old story about the guy who moved to San Francisco in 1849 to sell shovels? As we notice the new web business model evolving around a few core infrastructure players, and everyone shouts “ignore the little man behind the curtain“, who dares be Dorothy?

Warning: Sometimes a blog post is less an essay than stream of consciousness… and some people may get headaches from wading through such a post (see the first comment - sorry!). The rest of you have been warned. By the way, according to the wiki, “stream of consciousness” was first defined by William James, the brother of Henry James, my favorite author during my college days. William James grew up in NYC. I grew up 6 miles or so outside NYC. William James lived in the Astor house… and my family has some connections to the Astors. Funny that, eh?

If you are in SEO or SEM, a domainer or an advertiser or a big brand, no argument the future looks bright, but is is also tumultuous. Who controls the commercial future more, the domainers, the marketers, the market (users) or the search engines like Google?

The brands are the ones who spend the most on advertising, and those same brands are the ones who will eventually recognize that perfect-match domains are worth $200,000 or more. The budget-minded advertisers are buying traffic more than branding, which they can value with metrics and the buying of which they can adjust practically in real time. Two very different “markets” for the same PPC spend, and look at how they are currently bidding against each other. That can’t last (?) nor can the practically real-time management of that spend (made possible by the benevolence of the search engine/ppc provider). That can’t last either (?)

The SEO and SEM move the market, which does whatever it has been moved to do (direct traffic, search traffic, supportive cooperative promotion, etc). The SEM uses tools like PPC, while the SEO approaches the issue from a Judo-like perspective, influencing the search engine to influence the users for them. Of course they cross-over. They have to cross over.

What about domainers? They own the opportunity that exists outside of the search-controlled traffic, so obviously the future of branding involves domainers. Domainers feed a little off of search, and a little more off of SEM (SEM highlights the value of the perfect match domain, and promotions drive type in traffic to some extent). But aside from investment, the biggest influence they seem to have right now is in the traffic arena. They funnel a huge amount of advertising traffic. At the ad network’s discretion.

So in the end, who is in control? What’s the end game look like?

I think domainers recognize that they wield less influence as domainers than they do as publishers. Hence the move away from parked pages to a focus on development, which is fueled by many other factors (many of which are indirectly fueled by the same core issues of domains as advertising venues). SEM in my view has always been a tactical job, at the whim of advertising networks. SEM provides the man power and tools to utilize the ad networks efficiently, and manage the market in ways complimentary to that deployment of the advertising networks. No ad networks and SEM is “social media” and squarely in the realm of Public Relations and Advertising.

More complex tools and more need for ad networks means increasing sophistication of SEM (and increasing value added by SEM practitioners). And SEO? It’s all about search. As long as search engines are free and drive traffic, SEO will rule as much as that search-driven traffic rules. If you don’t need search referrals, you don’t need SEO.

It seems the user is in charge of the end game, no?

If users like search, SEO and SEM rule and we can expect some big changes in the way brands are competing with arbiters and others buying traffic from search engines. Domainers reap the rewards of their investments as brands buy domains, but not much reward from traffic except at the discretion of the ad networks. I doubt browser makers will continue to permit natural (type-in) traffic to find its way to the generic domains like it does now. If domainers build their own ad networks, they play traffic cop and optimize. If there’s enough traffic, will we see DNO’s (domain network optimizers) shaping the traffic funnels for optimal profits? Sure we will. The persuasion marketing people will be all over that.

If users find domains to be better than search, which would probably require a substantial adoption of good, generic and perfect-match domain names (”brands”), the publishers win the game. If YourFavoriteYellowPages became the perfect pseudo-search solution to satisfying Internet users involved in commercial transactions, who needs a search engine? Who needs more than ONE perfectly branded domain? If Google went all-paid, and users were happy, then SEO goes away, SEM becomes Advertising and PR, and domains are either everything (the brand) or a small piece (listed in the directory as a destination).

And when that happens, we shall see a renewed interest in FREE SEARCH, as people get tired of reading what MyFavoriteYellowPages says or they get tired of the way the Domain Network Optimizers keep funneling them to FriendFinder or ClassMates.com or other BigBrands. And the reason the search experience makes them happy? Because through FREE search, they find www.johnon.com and all the other “publications” that are new, fresh, interesting, or otherwise “refreshing”. When that happens, I suppose I’ll put ads onto johnon.com to try and make some pocket money.

Huh. The more things change, the more things stay the same.

This morning’s “Meet the Registrar” session demonstrated the importance of the registrar in domain asset management. We all know this, and have been aware, but have we been truly aware? As domains increase in value, they become more valuable than money, yet how many are “stored” at registrars where security is not exactly top priority?

There are several domains at auction tomorrow over a million dollars. Many in the high hundreds of thousands. A digital bit in a database, with a value so high. Obviously there is a burgeoning market for stolen domains. A domain gets stolen away and then moved around and then sold on the private market, where the new owner may eventually be informed that it was indeed ms-appropriated. How many of us have insurance for our domain assets? Right. So what happens in this case? Someone loses a lot of money.

And the registrar is the middle man carrying much of the burden of restoring peace, and yet how many of you know your registrar as well as your bank officer? If your registrar receives a request to transfer your domain away this coming Sunday morning at 4:21 am your time, will they call your cell phone to check with you, or simply let it go?

Every registrar says the same thing - never use a free email address. “I can hack an AOL email account in 10 minutes” said one of the registrar reps here, AT THE PODIUM. Wow. There are programs out there mining the WHOIS database of email addresses that are expired” - so those domains can be stolen away. Believe it. “If your email is expired for a week and you have a god domain name, they will take it away within just a week or two”. Make sure the email you use for WHOIS is not on the registered domain. That makes it much easier for the hijackers to steal the domain.

Moniker notes that their domains are always locked unless they are in transfer. Why else would anyone ever want a domain unlocked? Moniker allows you to make changes, updates, etc without ever “unlocking” the domain, and wonder why other registrars allow domains to be left in the “unlocked” state when they have not been put into transfer.

TRAFFIC is run by the World Association of Domain Name Developers, and the WADND board of advisors (made up of big-time domainers) has developed a set of criteria for registrars, presented as a WADND “Seal of Approval”. If they meet these strict requirements for domain asset management (which addresses all of the above, plus more to ensure domain registrants are well positioned to not only secure their domain assets but safely manage them), the registrar can show they have that Seal of Approval. So far, 4 registrars have received the Seal of Approval: Moniker, Fabulous, DirectNic, and TuCows. GoDaddy was here this morning, saying they meet the requirements but don’t have the seal of approval. Maybe that’s true, but it didn’t sound very convincing.

Some questions from the audience:

Q: Why isn’t privacy free? Good question. GoDaddy didn’t say anything, but Moniker says they charge a small fee to cover internal management and handling of requests through the toll free number. Another registrar noted that they bundle free privacy with 5 domain registrations at one time, for example.

Q; For bulk transfers, why can’t the registrar send EP codes in bulk? Moniker answered that they do indeed send EPP codes in bulk for bulk transfers. I can imagine this is a balance issue, considering security and convenience.

Q: Do you automatically park a newly registered domain and keep the profits? GoDaddy says they do, and you can always change the DNS if you want. Moniker stresses again that you should have a relationship with your registrar, and via that relationship you should be informed of your parking options and the best way to park is to put it into the parking service. Another registrar (I wish he would re-state his registrar… was it redneck?) says they give a new registrant 3 days to do something with the DNS, and then if it lies dead they park it themselves.

Q: Can you all comment on how some registrars seem to make it difficult to transfer domains away? Yahoo! was cited as an example of a registrar that seems to work hard to prevent domain owners from transferring domains away from Yahoo! Moniker notes that some registrars put 60 day hold if a change is made to the admin contact, suggesting it is for security reasons, but it’s a registrar-specific policy and not required. The sense I got when Moniker said this is that GoDaddy has this 60 day policy because it is more profitable for them to lock up a domain that is about to be transferred. That practically insures an extra year of registration at GoDaddy, and probably also keeps a lot of domains at GoDaddy.

I will post here and there live from the TRAFFIC East domain conference, because the overlap of SEO and domaining is just so darn interesting I can’t help myself. This is just one of those posts from the floor of TRAFFIC  East in Hollywood Florida…. 

LeaseThis.com notes 2 separate camps meeting at the Google/Yahoo! trading post these days: Fortune1000 with big money, long investment cycles, and futures-research based vision, and domainer entrepreneurs with rapid change, independent strategic thinking. Kleenex didn’t want to be known as “tissue” and so had no interest in tissue.com. Domainers proved that “being” the definition of tissue on the Internet is extremely valuable. They are now called “domain assets” instead of domain names over at LeaseThis.com, because both camps understand that nomenclature. It’s not about clicks and uniques, but sales and conversions. When you look at sales/conversions, domain assets make sense to both camps.

There’s an office game over at LeaseThis.com… something like “how insane a URL for an advertisement have you seen” game. Instead of a short, memorable, generic defining domain name tied to a commercial campaign, many companies still use bizarre, long, difficult to remember “insane” domain names. We’ve all seen them, right? Add yours to the comments just-for-fun.

Adam Dicker from High Impact Sites… the future is relationships. Domainers are focused on acquisition, and missing the opportunity to make relationships that enable development. Planets.com should build a relationship with Discovery Channel, for example.  During the morning session he got an email offer to buy his domain zzzp.com for $1000. It is a nonsensical name in which he saw no value himself, but obviously somewhere someone values it at least $1000. That’s how it works. Adam says next 4 years is big for domainers.

Owen Frager has a blog… TheFragerFactor. Why it’s on blogspot I can’t explain, but his bio says he’s a creative strategist with a history of successes driving commerce through brands. I’ll try and meet him later and ask him myself, I promise. Sprint spent 1.8 billion in advertising and failed as a business during the same period of time. Hyundai ran a campaign branding a BigDot something or another without owning the domain. By the way, they lost sales over the two months of what they called a successful advertising campaign.  He notes NowWhat.com selling insurance where brand names like AllState wouldn’t convert nearly as well…. and he’s right. FreeCreditReport.com sold 20 million subscriptions via advertising FreeCreditReport.com to the public. he calls it “Direct Response Advertising”.. I think we call it offline promotion for affiliate income. Whatever. The Solgar-owning supplements company has 20,000 products in it’s marketing inventory… most with bad names. That’s a need for 20,000 plus domain names, no? Someone needs a matchmaker.

Leland Hardy’s NewYork.com is the “World’s Greatest Website” and does little promotion. It represents over 4,000 site seeing tours, and 70,000 hotels. Nice affiliate business. Oh, and he’s from Philadelphia, not New York. Go figure. His original concept for NewYork.com? A personal shopper service to help people who come to New York find the counterfeit shops on Canal Street where they could buy Gucci watches for $5. Even wrote a business plan around that, although he never built it that way. They key to success? Developing direct relationships with the tour companies and hotel operators as a referring affiliate. Smart man, that Leland Hardy. Oh, and by the way, he owns a domain asset NewYork.com that, for some reason, is worth a helluva lot of money. Let’s say it together….. “nice”.

By the way, did I mention that there is an outlet strip every 4 feet at TRAFFIC 2007? Nice.

Ron Jackson notes he is very, very positive about the domain industry. No kidding. Someone estimates a 37% growth rate for advertising in the domain channel alone next year. Up to 60% of every new ad dollar spent will be in new media. Ron owns DNJournal.com, as everyone knows. He’s such a bright guy I love to read his site, and he’s very supportive of the “human capital” of the domain industry. Nice read.. I totally agree. At last night’s cocktail party everyone I met was a domainer, but I didn’t meet anyone who wasn’t also a venture capitalist, private equity partner or fund manager, brand or trade executive, or otherwise a successful, informed, and involved high level executive (discounting myself, of course). Ron says things like how likely it is that the next American Billionaire is likely to come out of this very room. Ron says he gets so excited at TRAFFIC he can’t sleep well when he’s here. He supports the ICA initiative… noting the millions of asset value needing protection. As Howard Neu said after Ron finished speaking, “Excellent as usual Ron, thank you”.

Ammar Kubba says everything is looking good right now, and reminds everyone to “provide a high quality experience for end users and advertisers”. Educate people about where the traffic is coming from, because he believes parked domains are getting a bad rap in the press and word of mouth.

Peter Lamson of BuyDomains sold 80 domains for $200,000 in revenue last month (where domains start at $700 and go up). Global small business demand for domain traffic via domains. Drivers are online ad spend growth and the coming online of the global small business sector. The demand for brandable domains is MASSIVE.

Last week Google revealed a new meta tag called “unavailable_after“. It provides webmasters with a means of telling Google in advance that a page of content will become irrelevant after some future date. When Google acknowledges unavailable_after, it schedules a removal of the page from the search results. The page is still indexed, according to Google, but it won’t be shown in any search results.

I haven’t deployed the unavailable_after robots meta tag yet, so I can’t test if a &filter=0 will reveal it or not in the SERPs, but I look forward to seeing if that will be the case.

I think everyone should take mental notes of how easily Google can cause a page to not appear in the SERPs, even though it is published and indexed. A simple flag and it’s gone. Lest you wondered how hard penalizing pages was over at the ‘plex.

Anyway there has been much debate about unavailable_after, and I am not referring to the seo attention whores arguing about who blogged the story first or who didn’t give whom credit for the reference. I’m talking about legitimate practical, competitive webmasters thinking out loud about what this meta tag might be good for, if anything.

Well, some time ago I wrote that to be competitive, you have to think like a Dirty Bastard. Well, I just heard from a Dirty Bastard SEO and he has a use for the unavailable_after meta tag. He uses it to screw his (former) clients.

He sets unavailable_after to read in a date via a dynamic script, from a central flag stored on the server. Each month he updates that central date flag to track his client’s account status. As soon as his client has ceased to maintain on his month-to-month SEO extortion program, the unavailable_after meta tag ceases to maintain, and becomes and expiration trigger for the web pages in the Google SERPs. Stop the SEO maintenance? You lose your traffic. Plain and simple.

Evil, yes? According to this Dirty bastard, if the client doesn’t know any better, they deserve to be removed from the SERPs. He says it was his service that put them into the SERPs, so it’s ok that a lack of his service will remove them from the SERP. They are free to get back in; no one’s stopping them. He feels he doesn’t do any harm, he just stops delivering the services he was being paid to deliver, because they stopped paying.

Wow. Attention SEO consultants - beware the unavailable_after meta tag. It’s the new “disallow /”, the new very-first-thing-to-check when doing an SEO site audit.

A few weeks back I was Matt Cutts Watching when I noticed he was participating in a Law Bloggers meeting. Mental note made; move on. Now I see Matt report from his blog about the Bay Area Blawgers meeting. Best bit: Matt notes how the US Copyright Office houses a database of domain names associated with registrations for Online Service provider status. In order to technically qualify for the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA, a company or web site must register with the copyright office. That registration costs $80, and includes a place to name the business and list alternative names for the business. In other words, it’s a self-registered list of domain names owned/operated by a legal entity, identified in the public records.

Now Matt didn’t identify it as such… that’s what you need me for :-) Matt simply commented on how Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation polled the table about DMCA takedown notices, and pointed out how easy it was to register as an Online Service Provider. But if I were Matt, and that was news to me, I would take a look at that US Copyright web site and when I saw page after page of webmasters listing all of their “other domains” I would say aaaahhhhh…. and fire off an email to a junior Googler to “organize this information”.

If you look around the US Copyright filings for Online Service Provider you will see many, many webmasters listing dozens or more domains under one registration. Some of the big boys also list domains together, while others seem to register single domains. Warner Bros Entertainment for example listed entertaindom.com and conspiracytheory.com, which have WHois records assigned to Warner Entertainment, but they also included orgymusic.com on the same registration form, which has a Whois registrant of Astro America, LLC in San Francisco. Nice find for Google, as this allows Google to associate orgymusic.com with Warner Brothers when, based on Whois alone, that was not obvious public knowledge. That’s just one example for you.

I am sure it would be fun to dig around the site further, but I don’t have time. Besides, Google can make it searchable and cross-reference-able, which would be MUCH easier the scanned PDFs. I am sure Google could ask for this information direct from the copyright office in electronic form,or perhaps make a trade of indexing for access. In many cases this makes a nice addendum to Google’s efforts to associate web sites to each other and webmasters to web sites (via email address at the very least, names and legal representatives, etc). Right now it looks like mostly big corps and adult web sites, but it seems clear that this is a likely addition to the legal requirements for web publishers and so … another tool for Matt’s Top Secret Spam Fighting VPN-connected laptop computer!

I just hope that when Google organizes this part of the world’s information, it makes it accessible to all of us and not just the competitive teams inside Google. Maybe that’s a good idea for the Copyright office… if you give away our data, require that the indexed form also be freely available to the public? Maybe a Taxpayers Content License or something?