I suspect that most of the posters are like me, domain hunters and gatherers of available
names related to their area of interest or business plans. In an intensive
day of scouting name spaces yesterday, to try to determine potential for some available
.infos related to my interests, I was reminded how shitty much of the .com space
is.We worry that .info won't be developed or promoted as quickly as we would like,
but the ".com is king" rant is bullshit. Sure it's been in the marketplace
for 20 years, but a very large percentage of the .com space is empty or unadulterated
crap, providing the user with a growing frustration.
I suspect the total number
of the old TLDs that some registrars like to remind us have been registered is totally
misleading and suspect that a very large percentage were never developed and
have lapsed.
When you search you find the majority of currently names undeveloped,
for sale, or sites tenuously linked to another topic - often as not filled with bloody
popups.
A great many .coms and .nets are underdeveloped - beautiful generics
diminished or underutilised by way of the fact the current owner hasn't seen or bothered
to develop its potential. This incidence of underdevelopment can be just as frustrating
as sites full of popups, as you have wasted time and your expectations are not fulfilled.
Had
the current owners of these underdeveloped .coms and .nets bought .infos instead,
the potential of the names may have been more obvious and they may have utilised
a different business model.
Having worked in universities and schools for 16 years,
I know that today's young Internet users are information searchers who are not impressed
with the commercial world and I predict will always choose a .info site over a .com
of the same name - and will quickly book mark it, tell their friends, and use it
instead of a search engine when the .info site gives them what they want.
In fact
I think the time is just right for .info sites to come into operation when so many
if not all search engines proving time consuming and annoying. I think search
engines are good, but I think good .info sites will be better.
There are so many
areas of human endeavour which are better suited to .info than .com or .net, which
if developed well can be just as if not more commercial valuable as the "old" extensions
and much more valuable than country codes. I don't think .info owners have to worry
about .biz, as most will prove as valuable as .TV.
I also believe that there is
a public spiritedness I have seen at the forum which if converted into .info sites
giving value for time and or money, then the .info pioneers with good names will
do very well.
Good names - I don't think they were all taken in the fraud orchestrated
by Afilias Ltd. Afilias and some of its registrars aided and abetted around
10,000 fraudulent Sunrise registrations, but many of these names from the hours I
have spent at Richard Henderson's theinternetchallenge.com are not so great and many
appear to have very limited .info application.
Now I am not saying that the 10,000
Sunrise frauds didn't grab some great names. I know I invested the majority
of my .info preregistration budget in names that went to registrants who chose to
cheat Landrush applicants in a launch designed apparently by cheats for cheats.
But
there were also great .info application names taken by companies with age old TMs
for things like washing powders.
Depite the uncertainty of who may end up with
the good "suspicious" names that have yet to be challedged "and equitably released
to the public", the good names being hoarded by speculators and the good names that
a stupid launch model gave to current TM holders - tide.info - no, not for your boaties
or fisherpersons (can't be too careful) - you get detergent! - I think we have managed
to get some great names that have the potential to change the way the Internet is
utilised.
I like the valuation model that Challenge put up using a real estate
analogy and I can see good .infos being very prized property and income earners.
I
hope we all have rewarding times developing and operating our new .info sites.
What a great shame we have had to do business with the whale shit registry Afilias
Ltd. and lose so much money to Afilias's approved registrars who became a part of
Afilias's corrupt culture.
We must not forget the straight registrars who disassociated
themselves from the Afilias .info fiasco, and those whose ethics made them break
the ICANN approved Afilias Registry Registrar License Agreement and completed checks
on the accuracy and bona fides of Sunrise applications. ( I noted some time
ago that Melbourne IT and CDNS(?) backed out of the planned Afilias consortium very
early - I wonder if they accurately foresaw what trouble Afilias Ltd. was heading
for? I wonder also if very smart and reliable registars like Gandi chose to
wait for realtime .info registrations rather than be involved in the scam of the
.info Sunrise for the same reason.)
Got a bit rambling and off topic - sorry, but
still on my morning's first coffee.