Domain Owl

The architectural lasagna that is now Chile after a massive earthquake has given the spur to domainers grabbing Chile and geo names for that region. Spurred by the recent experience of the Haiti disaster, domainers can buy a name and route traffic or lease the url and forward it to legitimate sites covering Chilean recovery or information and news sites.

The Chile quake was initially reported as 8.3 but may have been as high as 8.8 on the Richter scale. The death toll for Chile is still in the triple digits and searchers are attempting to liberate any trapped survivors.

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Word on the wires is that the new compendium of Oracle after swallowing Sun is giving birth to a great new brainchild. This new bonanza is a crashing spear into the world of domaining; A new domain name registrar and hosting company that will blow the socks off current market leaders (rhymes with Schmoe-daddy).  Sparcstations off the forward bow!

No name has been chosen by Sun/Oracle yet, but super secret teams in Cupertino and Mountain View are already clashing over turf. The technical entity will not be in violation of any super secret hosting or redundancy agreements because the new spinoff corporate entity will be a separate company. Sweet! The domainer’s mouth waters at the possible debut deals offered….

Domainers in the know and technical cognoscienti scoff that nobody can topple the Danica-fronted Big Daddy.  But hosting service watchers have heeded the firestorm of complaints that “Schmoe-daddy” customers have. Buying the registrar is the nice part, some domainer running an ICANN-powered fruit stand will make a tidy bundle.

Godaddy is going to lose a lot of share to the next big name/hosting reg that comes along.  A catchy name, a viral vid, and tier pricing by “Sunacle” could bring an avalanche of hosting customers their way. If Oracle and Sun can bring it to market and capture the whole domaining market, Sun will finally have beat Cisco at something.

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Following a name vogue through a technology development cycle can be exciting. Suddenly, everyone needs information about the new technology or product and they need to find it fast. That’s when a domain with some keywords and terms in the domain name comes in handy. One such domain illustrates perfectly the development model in sum.

Take LCDTVBracket.com. This is a site focused solely on the data regarding LCD TV wall mounts for advanced technology TVs. But soon the market will roll over into HD and 3DTV HD. Games and television and entertainment are headed that way.  The product review model and technology information congruence make SEO a snap.

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Trump. One word. Don’t need any more. A fusillage of sound bites, bad comb-overs and Page Six columns from recent memory come to mind. But the T-Rump is having some issues with the debateable power of his name. That is, the negotiable power he can derive from another’s use of it.

The Trump name as a brand has served as a lodestone of gossip, New York real estate scandal and reality TV banter for at least a decade. But currently Trump has the brass to knock his investors and scavengers of his casino empire for a loop. Evidently they think they can co-opt his name while operating the casinos. False! The Donald is here to stay.

What’s in a name? Would a casino by any other name smell as sweet? It’s hard to know how Carl Icahn and the other playboy billionaires plan to reorganize value of the resorts in Atlantic City without the Trump name. And T-Rump wants a thick percentage if they use it.

Check out the Global Superbrand of Trump. Ivanka’s New Book, the Trump Card, is available. My friends, that is a website. A comb-over by any other name would not smell as profitable. In my book, anybody working this hard to promote their name gets the leasing rights.

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Manly man on the scene! Actor Isaiah has ignited the Web with his Old Spice tongue in cheek commercial. Easily the funniest viral video to come down the internet pike in some time, this internet clip shows what one funny (and modestly produced) video can do for a brand.

Manly Man got a ton of Google detritus, but Old Spice manly (commercial) was a Google fill-in. On-target marketing from a brand formerly associated with staggering sailors with knotty muscles wearing striped jerseys and sandals.

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Huzzah to the TV series that Twitter built, namely “Sh*t That My Dad Says”, which will star William Shatner. Yes, that William Shatner. A genuine channel o’ fun, the Twitter hit Sh*t That My Dad Says”, is on fire.  Talk about galactically funny (drum crescendo please). William Shatner is so cool, it’s like Robert Goulet and JFK had a baby.

Hiring Shatner is brilliant, as anything William Shatner does is earthquaking news for blogs, shock radio and fanpages worldwide. The Kirk was mighty, but the humor of Shatner has charged everything from “Dodgeball” to “Boston Legal”. And rightly so. If you don’t believe me, watch a movie called ‘Meeting Bill”, Nonstop Shatner. Nonstop fun.

Shatner is such a funmaker the town of Williamsburg hosts a fest titled (wait for it),  the Shat Ball in tribute to the Star Trek icon. At 79, even being born in Canada can’t stop this cinematic tour de force. Check out these quotes, when you have a star this beloved the copy writes itself:

” Set phasers on mockery!  Adorned in Starfleet gold and blue shirts (there were no red shirts to be seen because they’re, well, you know), revelers celebrated Shatner’s birthday at the Metropolitan Avenue club in style with tankards of Klingon Blood Wine (otherwise known as red wine) and Romulan Ale (Stella Artois with green food coloring).  No gold and blue shirts (there were no red shirts to be seen because they’re, well, you know)”.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/captain_icon_shatner_bridge_williamsburg_tK9rDFcfCsgkf4jULTKBhJ#ixzz0gf4OYvVm

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Walter Koenig’s son Alexander Koenig has been missing ever since he left for Vancouver. Jamming from friends offering gigs and returning borrowed belongings, Xander Koenig may have gone where no man has gone before. Any domainer with a Star Trek name could capitalize huge on this.

Koenig’s parents stiffed Larry King last night, leaving on the razor’s edge of the interview with no explanation. Koenig Jr.’s disappearance is big SEO news, with a 2.1 million increase in searchability for the young man’s name in the past week. Alexander Koenig ditched a return flight from Vancouver earlier in the week, alerting family and friends something was wrong.

The King departure puts a new wrinkle on the matter. Do the Mr. & Mrs. Checkhov know something? if Koenig Jr. has gone “Into the Wild” the King interview won’t help (King’s wildlife demographic unknown at presstime). If the thing is a hoax, it’s a huge embarrassment to Koenig.

One thing is for sure, people are Googling this thing at warp speed. Domainers take note! Let’s just hope Koenig Jr. wasn’t wearing the red jersey. We all know what that means.

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If you’re wondering why so much development is happening in video portals these days, take this down. Video websites feed via upload on video portals like Guba, Hulu, and Youtube. The networks have taken steps to protect their content by encapsulating it inside proprietary software environments.

ABC has had live video feeds via thin client of some of its shows for years now, as well as CBS and NBC. Yet all three of these networks have struggling applications, overloaded websites, and flattened error prone blank white screens on any event. Wherefore no hosting robustness, alphabets?

The day after the premiere of LOST’s episode, the abc main website struggles to load. The saturation black screen is almost 95% blank, and any click gets a white screen with a few html plain wrap links. Does the architecture really by video really kill these sites, or are they poorly designed for their bandwidth?

NBC has wrapped its Olympics coverage in Silverlight, which I was informed yesterday by many system messages could not be downloaded or installed. Yesterday I was informed by ABC’s site I was in another country, not the United States and could not view the video. And CBS stalls every day after a Survivor episode airs.

Frankly, only Fox TV can get it right. Gordon Ramsey wouldn’t have it any other way. But it seems end users can support video portals as well as mega media corps. So buy the video name, launch the portal, and greet your viewers. Because the lines at the source are long.

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We at Domainowl like to give our fellow webmasters the benefit of the doubt, but here is a situation fraught with question marks.

Silver medal winning men’s figure skater Evgeniy Plushenko famously responded to losing the gold medal in Vancouver last week by trash talking the loss and alleging a poor scoring system.

Plushenko evidently had pinned his hopes of getting a second gold medal on his quad jump. But many observers watching (and the judges too) noticed Plushenko not skating his best and technical errors that sliced the margin advantage to Evan Lysacek, the gold medal winner.

But sore loser Pushenko immediately made statements to the press regarding his wrongful “loss”. Even Alexander Putin reportedly told Plushenko that he had “really” deserved the gold. So yesterday when Plushenko’s website showed his “platinum” medal from Vancouver 2010, many sports and Olympics watchers cried foul. No platinum medal exists, and the implication is clear: the “platinum” medal outranks Lysacek’s gold.

Is this a real beef or just an attention getting (click tricking) website gimmick? The image above shows what the site looks like now, the “Vancouver 2010″ platinum medal prominent. Not many athletes could claim a fake Olympics medal on their website, making us wonder if this webmaster is just trying to grab clicks. But no advertising is shown.

Certainly the American bloggers are up in arms concerning the “platinum” medal, attracting a storm of browsers the Ukrainian skater probably never saw before. Is this a real imbroglio, or merely a device to get stats and then sell the space on Plushenko’s website? Time will tell.

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Our swiftly overflying newsowl observes that Domaingang.com is back up.   Whatever hacking fun was going on seems to be over. I would advise the OPS to perhaps take fewer shots at the divorce proceedings of prominent domainers. (But there’s probably no connection).    This snarky slice of domaining fun is a must for rattled domain name owners herding names and buyers into the chute.

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