Domain Owl

A recently published article in Entrepreneur Magazine quoted a Google employee as citing the probability of getting funding from Google Networks, when connected to a member of the Google Networks employee’s own networks as a sizeable influence. Google ventures, launched in 2009, seems to play favorite son with only it own siblings. Does Google hope to attract all the best opportunities, or only venture it is already invested in through third parties?
Google’s article expresses candidly that referred deals from the personal networks of the seven investing partners are the golden children of Google’s venture arm. But opportunity seeking franchise or startup investor might scratch their heads about the point of applying for funding from a “global” venture capital grower that specifically only funds its own grandchildren. What do other investor funds think about such a narrow minded approach? And how can Google Ventures maintain a competitive profile in modern B2B business arenas with such core values?

Google has both promoted (to the Web) and denied (o the FCC) its business goals toward cornering the online market in forward thinking enterprises. Only Google can afford to overlook business opportunities not blessed by their own strategic development and those without personnel already in its own immediate business networks. This leaves good opportunities for angel funding for companies which don’t have the Google seal of Good Housekeeping on them. As a business strategy the entire functionality of a separate funding company seems like an elaborate bit of paperwork.

A curious quote from the Google Ventures article says “We don’t invest to help Google sell products or services. We don’t avoid companies that do that, but it’s not an objective of ours”. This sounds like the way companies talk when they are distinctly trying to not say their fundings are targeted to individuals already associated with their company. Life science companies and bioscience starups don’t really have an association with Google ventures or Google products, but it’s a safe bet the workplaces of those funded startups utilize Google products and apps. Just as if they were really Google business partners.

If you think this doesn’t sound like an equal opportunity funding resource, you’re probably right. Which makes it a target for every ethnic based startup requiring venture capital funding. Google Funding claims it invests in areas which Google “understands”. This is obviously the strategy behind the conception of Google Funding in the first place, to make sure a Google Ventures employee was already part of the ownership of anything they fund. So, what was that about Google not trying to monopolize its business venture clients in a monopoly-type business practice?

So, all a startup CEO needs to do to secure B2B enterprise funding is to target Google Funding using one of its own “areas of understanding” and tapping a Google Funding staff member or employee to be part of the enterprise. Just a hint: you’ll probably get accepted. In case the original CEO’s or partners look for fersher pastures, this leaves the Google ventures staffers holding the bag, and the blueprints and the copyrights. Just as Google intended it to be. (or B2b).

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Remember all those people who said the domain name game was falling into disuse and only a few big players would or could afford to be around this time this year? Well, all that conventional wisdom can be thrown out the window with a review of the news from the domaining landscaper of today. Some if it sounds new, some it sounds familiar. If it sounds like you’ve heard some of the news before, it means you are a card carrying domainer.

Make no mistake, the big names still govern the world of domains, and when Frank Schilling vends his millionth name or Google tries to partner with Skype, the headlines are about search engine movings and shakings. Yesterday Google was trying to establish specific infrastructure to take over the online world with categorical strategy, yet in the face of antitrust probes Google is suddenly a baby-faced child with no evil intentions whatsoever.

Online privacy has become an increasingly thorny issue, with major hackings taking place one servers in a disturbing frequency of instigation. When the ICE gets involved in domain names and hosting issues, commerce has arrived in the domain sector. The issues continue to make domainers wonder how much say they should have in their own industry. New precedents are being set every day for how domain name portfolio owners should make decisions about their names in the context of laws and ICANN regulations..

ICE claims that because servers are located in the United States, the material and code on those servers operates under American governmental jurisdiction. United States law enforcement has been in the news recently seizing potentially hackworthy servers, which should be more than enough to make rogue coders and sniffer system operators go dark. But does this mean clients of less than savory websites will simply seek out web hosting that is globally redundant? This makes the “redirect” of any webmaster to placing the hosting and domain name on separate servers of critical importance.

Some domaining debates will never grow old. Where does the value potential of country code top level domains really lie? Can peer domain name appraisals and monetization assessments be trusted? Do language barriers between character based alphabet lexicons interfere or enhance search engine results? Does a premium domain sale commission equal highway robbery? How far from cybersquatting is copyright infringement, and how much is a domainer liable for finding out? The argument over the efficacy of parking programs evolves endlessly and further again.

The perspective that domaining is an investment commodity market becomes more concrete when news about domain name sale commissions cloud the actual profit from any resale or auction purchase. Every domainer has to burn through a learning phase where backlink checkers, affiliate programs, web hosting complexities and comparative auction returns get examined. The fact that a modern domain name owner might have to wade through news feeds, purchased clicks, and paid posting is now a norm.

Domainers are now specialists in SEO, short names, numericals, and typo names. The establishment of a keyword domain name or a brandable domain can still make news when it resells in an auction frenzy. Flippa, SEDO, Godaddy and WhyPark are the talk of the domaining town. Traffic and parking programs have gone from performing a sidewalk shuffle to requiring approval to introducing innovative options again. Are domainers the customers of parking companies, or vice versa?

The exotic fringe of today’s practicing domaining professionals dance through a maze of traffic control, statistics manipulation, and illegal practices experimentation.Will the day come when actual Internet “Coast Guards” patrol the Web, actively chasing down smugglers of illegal clicks? International law works well in theory but when does a website operate in international waters?

Domainers may need to become astute in setting the deal terms in place when multiple continents are involved. The good news is that ideas become fresher and minds become more open to new website and domain based concepts as business online every day. Given the success of many nonsense words that became global brands that control online commerce today, the ability of anyone to select and leverage a domain name is now just a registrar shopping cart away.

Who knew that one day the Internet, not the sky, would be the limit?

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So there’s a website name you want to buy a domain for, or an idea you have for a company you want to start. The web hosting purchase for the idea and domain name usually requires an associated domain name for the enterprise. Coming up with these for other names and keywords can be easy. When it’s your personal project conceiving a domain can be harder. Word morphology can help.

Domainers have this happen sometimes. You always have great ideas about domain names but under pressure to come up with one right away, your mind goes blank. We call this domainer’s block.

Here are some tips and techniques to form a domain name from your idea or concept and some keyword alternators that can help domain morphology work for you. Be aware that each tier of these tips forms its own domain name market niche, and there are domainers who deal only in names with those specific keywords involved. In this case consider if buying the name you really want isn’t worth the price, and make an offer.

1. Cutesy names

I want to say a word about cutesy names because sometimes they do work. Other domainers may simply term them 5-character names or short domains (because of very short length of the domain word). Bitsy, anything -hoo.com, -gold- and others will occur to you as you try to think up the right one. But other formative names can be considered cute, such as “scout”, Mr-(whatever), and My-(noun/keyword).com.

2.Store Names

I call these names store names but they are essentially any name that indicates to a SERP bot or search engine that shopping is possible. A lot of people go shopping online. They do their browsing online, their information gathering online, and they do their fact checking online. They look for deals online and they want to shop. Look at the basic keywords of your idea. Play around with them. Insert them into the following word endings, such as -shop, -store, -hut, -house, etc.

3. Rhyming Names

Rhyming names can best be exemplified by Froogle, a budget spinoff of Google.com. This was supposed to be a shopping portal for low budget products with bargain prices, associated with (you guessed it) Google. If your name rhymes with a popular website, getting people to remember your website name might be made much much easier. Rhyme slang is very catchy and cool, and looks good in a logo. The memory and verbal elements of a name with verbal slang can have a lot going for them.

4. Forum Names

The names that indicate a bulletin board site online are fairly straightforward. As an example, we can use the keyword “morph” with other names to make a easy to remember and short easily typed in domain url.

Chat, speak, talk, quick, bb, cafe, and forum are the key words to attach to your idea words to make a new domain. In the domain morphology drill, these keywords plus domain word parts form domain names that in our example would be morphchat.com, morphspeak.com, morphtalk.com, morphquick.com, morphbb.com, morphcafe.com, and morphforum.com. (I do not own these names).

Obviously, some sound better and work better than others. Remember to save time by using a registrar that suggest available keyword domain combinations directly from the search result. Domain keywords such as babble, buzz, and chew can also work but may not always have as broad an appeal as the first group. In our example, these would be morphbabble.com, morphbuzz.com, ad morphchew.com. Morphbuzz.com could be a cute blog name.

5. THE names

The

names can be phunny to talk about because you need to make sure the articulation goes in the “the”. The use of “the” in forming a domain name principally occurs when the user is trying to establish an air of authority, especially if the site in question is a blog. The word

the

attached to anything makes it seem like an authority.

Remember also to check if there is a trademark or copyright on the name you form before you buy it and spend time and money and media resources and effort promoting the name. You might be doing the work for someone else. This type of name is best used when you really really love the name but it’s taken and you’d like to start out with as close to most desired domain possible.

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The eruption of twitter as a marketing tool has made for some confusion in the online ranks. What started out as a method of notifying people or pertinent news is now a channel for almost nonstop promotion and public relations. It was not meant to be a play by play or stream of consciousness narrative, but many use it that way. The webmasters, domainers and promoters I know tend to use the use Twitter in an indistinguishable way that means little to the end user.

1. Twitter Material must be palatable

The competition in the blogosphere for content based blogs is tough. The author has to have some credentials, style, a proven track records or basic skills to expect to get anywhere. It’s hard to find a public personality today who doesn’t have their own Twitter, Facebook, MySpace channel or vertical PR plane. that’s probably how they got famous in the first place. But for Britney Spears or Kanye West to have a Twitter audience, they need to be somehow relevant. A Twitter account that goes nowhere is evident fast.

2. Twitter News and Tweet material text should be important to the recipient.

I am not sure what user base Charlie Sheen thinks is on his Twitter account. He might have over 900,000 names in his old black books alone. They may be his “end users”. The name assciated with the blog author or Twitter composer should be a status association conferring a kind of authority to the Twitter. With equal access to every piece of media, nobody needs to Twitter about anything. Yet the actual deed of sending out a Tweet makes news.
But the rest of us are enjoying (or enjoy being appalled by) the ridonkulous spectacle Sheen is making in his career and in the media regarding his TV shows and it’s producers. Poor Emmy voters thought they were showing him some good times after his endless addictive battles. But Charlie Sheen isn’t Robery Downey Jr. He isn’t climbing on the wagon. He’s actually throwing his career under a bus. (His lawyers earn more money with every embarrassing statement he makes).

3. Twitter Content must be important to the recipient.

Too many emails that come into my inbox are trailing feathered off leads form ,ong ago ffers I signed up for or blogs I signed up for to comment, or even forums and buletin boards whose newsletters I thought I might enjoy. When you have fifteen minutes to crack open and shut a piece of business and you are weaving through piles of junk mail to find the critical data bit, it all seems worthless. if your Twitter channel and notifications aren’t relevant and related to somethig the end user cares about, your Twitters will start hitting the Recycle Bin.

4. Tweets Must be Exclusive, Timely, and Pertinent

We’ve all seen websites and blogs that intend to be relevant to subjects A, B, and C, but cobever news bytes and sound snippets and video uploads of almost any kind of news a loaded keyword or meta tag category can cement in their autoblog. The reasons autoblogs don’t work is becase the content is unoriginal. Coupons, deals, savings, special offers, these things take on a nightmarish cast when anything labeled a service is a deal and any price at all is featured as a value.

5. Be the First to Market or Not at All

Google is cracking down on unoriginal content and source blogs may resent you capturing their news and delivering down the line to autoblogs who follow your chain of content so they don’t have to credit originality from the original source. Try to find new ways of promoting your central idea, keywords, or product without seeming to echo what everyone else is saying. While that seems to be the point of Twitter, what people should be doing is analyzing and delivering their own message or reaction in a statement to something else.

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The news beating on the tom toms is official, Facebook’s integration of social networking is now a fixed integer of the Google algorhythm. This has been a convention of the domain and website world for some time but Google is now acknowledging they are rolling the social networking  values of a site into their calculation for page ranking.

For any website without a social networking campaign, an effective campaign, that sinking feeling in the PR values will tell its own tale. The types of avenues to a successful social networking (read Facebook) strategy are everywhere. But what is the best way to sink your teeth into a Facebook marketing strategy? Dive in and let your user groups know about your site. Ask for feedback ad send messages. Let Facebook be your new SEO campaign headquarters.

The goal of any domainer? To get their website “liked”. People can “like” something without being a friend. The key is to deliver an app, service, information set or product at the site that will balance out the liking. A huge social networking value for a near template web site will make Google look silly. We hope. But carrying forth visiting Facebook users from your targeted website and delivering bookmarking Friends is worth its weight in SEO gold.

One has to hope that Google isn’t handing over too much SEO power to another online site. Core demographics should match the people doing the liking, such as a fireman putting forth a “Like” for the website that offers a free testing for the civil exam for firefighting. Qualified Facebook traffic in and of itslf could start a tidal wave of end users flocking to your website and heightening the value of your domain name. Get cracking!

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The Domain Owl has been watching how Viacom is treating the YouTube matter. Sure, YouTube started out with the best of intentions. People scrupulously followed the rules. But then things changed. The mass of uploaders was impossible to police and bottlenecked the very fluidity of rapid dynamics YouTube launched the site to encourage. Onward rolled the subpoenas.

Everybody and their brother knows that once YouTube members started uploading pieces of movies, and scored fan videos, the gloves were off and billions of illegally copyrighted sequences were online. But instead of learning what the public wanted, copyright holders went screaming to the authorities. They demanded that YouTube comply with copyright laws or be shut down. YouTube stayed up.

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In a world where digital video, desktop publishing and independent movie making run rampant, the studios and the corporations decided that file codecs and lashings of wealth were more important than imagination and website participation. In a world without the internet, they would have been right. But that world is gone, and the laws that governed it are out of date.

But the Internet is here. Digital manipulation of files for commercial purposes and uploading for illegal download are not the same thing as making a fan based video for fun and uploading it for friends and browsers to enjoy and comment on. But companies like those suing Viacom would prefer to control the content people use and enjoy even in their own homes and on their own computers. The law does protect them, to some extent.

But using copyright law to prevent the creation of fan videos and new media products rendered by wit, imagination and artistic creativity is wrong. It’s like living in a Nazi state where the origin source and form must equal an equally palatable end product. Companies like Viacom want to encourage growth and differentiation instead of control of that end product. And thing is, on the World Wide Web, they can’t control other people.  That genie is out of the bottle.

If companies like Viacom had keyboards for hire in the tens of thousands churning out fanvideos and uploading them onto a content controlled channel, that would be one thing. They could then claim that the abyss between individual art and corporate warez has been closed. But no such effort has taken place. If entertainment channels provided all the entertainment people wanted there would be no viewers per hours versus the extant millions.

But YouTube users are using their digital cameras to film an episode of Glee crosswise off their screens. How can that threaten a billion dollar corporation? The Internet opens up vistas of creativity (not the Windows kind) that a company like that would never dream of.  And once those pictures images and sounds and ideas are in the minds of millions of viewers, they can’t control the use of it, only the resale of it.

YouTube shows ads while content from other media and other creators shows. YouTube derives compensation and consideration from sponsors, created by the volume of users. A dalliance with the idea of a paid YouTube fee enraged copyright holders and studio entertainment behemoths even more. How dare once cent of revenue anywhere on this existential plane be exacted without their cut?

I read in the newspaper a few days ago that Viacom was challenging the judge’s interpretation of the law as it read in some clause in one of hundreds of contracts to govern these matters. Frankly, the language and terminology have obscured the issue by now. YouTube is a fact. Find out how to make money out of it or get back to work.

What I’ve never seen any of these studio companies do is launch a challenger for YouTube, even though they own the copyright to the material YouTube can’t use! That would be the way to go. But right now Hulu, Guba, DailyMotion and others own that space. And domainers trying to figure out what is legal and downright plagiarizing would have a better purview.

Until the movie companies can decide on a universal thin client with working download parameters (like Itunes) the online users will shape and visit download sites like the Pirate Bay. And justice doesn’t move swiftly enough to capture the lightning changes of forwarded masked domain urls and scripted squeeze pages. Frankly in my opinion affiliates should be tasked with reviewing what site content they pay revenues off of. Honest domainers would come out clean in that wash.

The Google-owned era of YouTube does show videos taken down due to copyright. To find the same level of creativity must one launch a pirate Tube on a dedicated server? With Google purchasing Widevine, bailing on Groupon, and getting scrutinized the EU, they’ve got enough to worry about. Viacom could find a better use for that money. Try paying some artists better fees or funding some films.

What is really happening is that one company wants to be paid because they missed out cashing on the Internet. At this time one would think they would move on and stop trying to turn back the clock. That way the internet and domain name developers could proceed along their chosen paths without Plan B and workarounds for whatever lawsuit YouTube is involved in this week.

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1.        Earth.google.com    www.earth.google.com
2.        Facebook.com        www.facebook.com
3.        Youtube.com        www.youtube.com
4.        Yahoo.com        www.yahoo.com
5.        Live.com        www.live.com
6.        Baidu.com        www.baidu.com
7.        Hu.wikipedia.org    www.hu.wikipedia.org
8.        Blogspot.com        www.blogspot.com
9.        Qq.com        www.qq.com
10.        Twitter.com        www.twitter.com
11.        Blogger.com        www.blogger.com
12.        Yahoo.co.jp        www.yahoo.co.jp
13.        Taobao.com        www.taobao.com
14.        Google.co.in        www.google.co.in
15.        Sina.com.cn        www.sina.com.cn
16.        Amazon.com        www.amazon.com
17.        Google.de        www.google.de
18.        Google.com.hk    www.google.com.hk
19.        Wordpress.com    www.wordpress.com
20.        Google.co.uk        www.google.co.uk
21.        Linkedin.com        www.linkedin.com
22.        Microsoft.com        www.microsoft.com
23.        Ebay.com        www.ebay.com
24.        Bing.com        www.bing.com
25.        Yandex.ru        www.yandex.ru
26.        Google.fr        www.google.fr

27.        Google.co.jp        www.google.co.jp

29.        Google.com.br        www.google.com.br

31.        Craigslist.com        www.craigslist.com
32.        Conduit.com    www.conduit.com

34.        Flickr.com    www.flickr.com
35.        Craigslist.org    www.craigslist.org

39.        Myspace.com    www.myspace.com
41.        Google.es    www.google.es
42.        Imdb.com    www.imdb.com

46.        Youku.com    www.youku.com

48.        Paypal.com    www.paypal.com

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If you read one book on Google this year, skip the business analysis junk and read Dave Gorman’s Google Whack Adventure. Published in 2004 by Overlook Press, the book relates the author’s “search” for the ungettable word combo. For normal people this may be a futile task. For domainers, who live and breathe by the rule of the search engine, it has an appealing quirk to it.

Gorman matches random nouns with other random nouns and creates a new term and then tries to find in in Google. Then he goes to the place where they do it and experiences it (The Google search term) for himself. This SERP laden wanderlust has some intriguing results. It all begins because Gorman is stuck in an airport with a nonrefundable ticket one day and randomly determines his flight destination.

Sound like an SEO experiment taken too far? Gorman isn’t the most entertaining writer around, but he does illustrate his point. By changing the game on the way Google is used, the results can be interesting. Dave Gorman actually gets out in the real world and covers ground to find his search results, instead of merely tasting them online via a web page. Few can match this claim.

Some of the combinations are strange indeed. But the fun while you read the book is that this guy allowed something as intangible as a search result to control his life vector and dictate his actual flight plan for living. Only someone willing to fully embrace the new age of the Internet in all its glory can claim such courage. From Holland to China, Berman racks up the frequent flier miles chasing his dream.

Dave Gorman’s Google Whack Adventure could not have been written unless the Internet was invented ad Google was universally known. This book does demonstrate fully how today’s random keywords can be tomorrow’s reality.  Gorman’s shtick is that he turns the Google premise upside down and looks for the most elusive and least common search result possible. And then he not only visits the website but hunts the operators down and has dinner with them.

Gorman uses Google to find some of the least searched terms in existence. This is SEO, inverted. Let’s look at some of the results. Hippocampi wallpaper, bibliophilic sandwiched, verandahs plectrums, and more lie behind door number Google. But who knew the diversity of niche could get so, well, niched?  Does everyone need to know what pomegranate filibusters are, and where they can be found?

The point, of course, is to showcase how ridiculous following the Google search engine as lord and master can be. One interesting social note is that author Dave Gorman seems to experience real live concrete social networking as a result of finding the geological reality of his random keyword hybrids. Who knows what kind of humanistic results this might show one day in Berman’s personal journey?

Buy Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure

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The time has come to talk of mice and men, of SEO title tags and image links and description with meta tags. Poesy aside, the competition has become fierce in the domain world for active backlink building and aggressive SEO engineering like never before. The sounds of SERP recalculation is hitting the air even as we speak.The time for SEO semantics is past.

The SERP is the Search Engine Results Page. The goal of a webmin or webpage administrator is the number one page or number one result. Of course this is not always possible. But the herd of domain name owners online has embraced the active engagement of SEO forces this season and shows no signs of letting go. Any domainer with time to watch TV is giving away clicks. Looking for unexploited nodes is the new flipping channels.

The new term in domaining is link wheeling. Linkwheel is a term used to describe your stack of pages where you have gone to an online web destination and furnished indexed material with a allowed hotlink back to your site or a directory link or a categorical abstract of your site together with a link.this can be done on sites that are very familiar like Ezines.com or not so established, such as Buzzle.com.

The Squidoo lens can be important for building an aggregate of responses and search interest. No longer are domainers concerned with whether or not there are people online enough to support their sites. They want to discuss every spoke in the link wheel.The link wheel is turning for competitor ever day. The moment you decide to vend your domain name, you better have a fistful of stats ready. These are no longer for nerds.

The forefront of domaining today is expanding the web and building demand for new link directory sites and article submission portals. if that weren’t complicated enough, the profusion of stores and niche promotional tropes leave some domainers with simple old-fashioned blogs looking sort of empty-pockets. And for the first time the black hat of SEO is getting pronouncedly more gray. Many a domainer is reviewing the services and yield of the email blast functionality with a more tolerant eye.

Blog owners are tracking their trackbacks. Site administrators are watching their traffic stats like rising bread in the oven. Programmers are mixing fresh slurp code like competitive chili cookoff contestants. SEO specialists are no longer evangelists but coaches. The final crush of using online tools and SEO indexing instruments has come. With equal access to most and broad access to many portals available to online citizens, the race to the finish should be a photo (sale) finish.

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One website domainers need to get nice and friendly with is Google. There is no more important website in the world to domain name traders and webmasters than Google. The trials and tribulations of how Google attained internet market dominance is a moot point. The fact remains that in today’s domain name market nobody can afford to do without Google tools, hacks and SEO optimization maxims.

But so many domainers skip very important Google tools and heightening SEO rules when composing their websites. The inclusions of tags on images, the use of alternate text, the proofing of the website on cross browser versions are only some examples. Ranking algorthythms operate on so many lines a webmaster practically has to be a wizard to master them all.

Submission to Google itself is a step many webmasters skip. The signing up for ad codes does not always equal full categorization in the Google universe. Page directories and indices of certain types of sites are also included in the Google page ranking index. But so many webmasters forget this and think that one Google ad submission equals total Google bot exposure. Such is not the case.

It’s not enough just to have Google adsense. There should be a Google map and many diverse types of sits tying in notices and links to the source site. Without decent attempts at development and distribution or related and topical material online, no SEO game plan can be considered worthwhile. The marketing plan must include all the facets of Google, not just the Adsense code inclusion in site HTML.

The SEO optimization wars claim many website casualties. This can be in part due to the fact that over ambitious domain name owners aim for the top hundredths or thousandth of their category without any game plan. Without a search engine result growth plan there is no basis to tie expectations to.

Google shows the way just by returning search results for terms. What kind of site is the result made of? What type of text is the key term noted from? What spiders and bots are scrubbing your page daily? The site absorbs all these data points. Feeds by themselves might be “light”, but together with an integrated hybrid of original content and text the seo value is there.

A type of snobbery can pervade the world of webmasters and domain name owners. News scrapes and press release rewrites are not “good enough” for these webmasters who need premium content or nothing. Yet these same webmasters can barely churn out 200 words a day! Investigating the way Google displays search results can show new domain name owners and seo-minded webmasters the path to seo greatness.

Any Google search will show that millions of different types of sites and keyword instances can feed into a search engine result that produces that website or a page on that website. The gateway to internet success making websites and promoting domain names is interpreting what Google is doing. Finding the threads are available for free at Google.com.

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