Domain Owl

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 But that world is gone, and the laws that governed it are out of date.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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I read an editorial by an archconservative columnist today bemoaning the lost cause of moderate conservatism. My instinct was not to empathize with the author but to investigate the target of his arrows, a website and individual called Breitbart.com. How could a liberal news bonfire like Breitbart’s apparatus dig such a pit under a conservative observer like David Klinghoffer and get it wrong?

It’s hard to believe that the National Review is as compelling reading or exciting journalism as many original news blogs, but the author persists in his shibboleths. When Huffingtonpost.com started, few people could stomach a woman whose main claim to fame seemed to be losing an expensive gubernatorial campaign with her somewhat estranged husband.

A visit to Breitbart.com does not elicit the “oohs” and “aaahs” of a CNN style media outlet. Nor does it salaciously tabloid up any items a la the New York Post or OMG.com. But what is fetching about Breitbart.com is that it is extremely impactful to experience a new media outlet whose brisk  data signals are not generated by mainstream profit making. Breitbart.com is an example of making a portal and destination out of your own real surname.

Breitbart is hardly a household name. It is not a noun or a verb nor is it a keyword hybrid or name referrer to any known category in the extremely competitive world of “name” domains.  Yet Breitbart.com has enough presence  as a brand to stand for the “low” and outre media extreme at the end of the news outlet pantheon. This type of blog generally receives little fanfare.

The world of words is not a timid one, and this author couldn’t be unconscious of the honor he was paying Breitbart (.com).  Just guiding online or print keyboard jockeys to web surf to a new destination is the kind of advice and counsel marketing firms are racking their brains to come up with. And I hadn’t even heard of the site before the chance catch of Klinghoffer’s article.

Klinghoffer claims the National Review is still readable. “Vital” and ‘interesting’ mean different things to different people. I doubt the National Review is destination daily reading for anyone who doesn’t have a vested interest in blogging it, reviewing it, cribbing it or is concerned in an article. While its past relevance is undiminished and certainly historic, it is a dinosaur whose text preaches to a tiny choir located among a globeful of singers.

Unless you live in John Updike country, neocons aren’t criminals. They’re relatives, friends and neighbors. I doubt anyone releasing published news online via their own portal strives for a political resonance first, news value second. To shape an impression of a news portal with custom video tags and headlines “crazy” simply peppers the pot with name calling where none is warranted.

And so we’re back to the neocon crunching. If Klinghoffer had wanted to “bury the lead’ he might have left many details of the crazy neoconservative news channel’s identity absent or the url unmentioned. Instead he gives focused free publicity to his stated opposition’s website? By any definition, that is web strategy with a …twist. Klinghoffer gives Breitbart.com reams of free P. R. in the guise of critiquing his site offering.

The effect of contemporary media is so ingrained the conditioning takes a while to wear off. Starting a new media outlet and polishing an offering to suit a cross hatch of online searchers and visitors takes guts, considering the competitors. The journalism media is full of reports how print journalism is dying.

Klinghoffer’s article practically begged any reader to take a look at the Breitbart site and judge for themselves. Yet the coverage did not differ in tone or object so radically to note any such contrasting effect as Klinghoffer suggested would be present. I found the Breitbart.com news offerings fresh and untainted by slant and advertising spin. And I would have been surprised if anyone had suggested there was a portal online I hadn’t gotten scent of.

From this point forward, Breitbart.com might be one of the sites I check out when something big is happening to get the third or fourth media perspective. This is a strongly branded domain providing useful and sticky content to readers and visitors. How Klinghoffer could have promoted his rival yet claimed to criticize them in the same article is a matter left to…magazines like the National Review.

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I read an article recently in Rolling Stone magazine about some computer hackers and the “crime of the century”. In trying to blog about it, I found an interesting conundrum: The top (series of) search engine result(s) from searching for the article was a blog review of the article by another blogger, not the magazine author. By Google searching the article title, the top page of search results was not the source, but the review.

Rolling Stone is proud to announce digital issues, but the title of this one article or searched keywords did not render a result even at the Rolling Stone site. This means that every mention or Twitter or email or Digg gets related back to the first online result, the same blog but not the copyrighted origin. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as stolen SEO.

Thus the source website yielded the SEO to the blogger. The blog author gave due credit and links to the source but the blog entry remains the top result for another author’s work. Yet it’s a mystery why the originating publisher would pass up an opportunity to get search result traffic. It’s hard to know the thoughts of a webmaster that stalls SEO discoverability and direct search engine referrals for putative digital subscriptions.

Stolen SEO should be a crime, but the individual leaving the door open are the source originators themselves. How many times have you found yourself using the Search bar at a given site, fruitlessly entering qualified terms, but not getting anywhere? These are the “light bulb” moments domainers and webmasters should tally in their tickler file of websites to build.

Target is a good example. I don’t go to Target.com because the search engine does not render results for products I know they have. Google searching should work, unless the clickthrough link pulls that scummy trick of landing the searcher at the landing page of the site, to begin the search all over again. IMOHO that is NOT a good search engine result. It creates work for shoppers.

How is this an opportunity for domainers? Domainers win when they conceive of a website that solves a problem and provides visitors with sticky content. Nothing could be more sticky than the search result for the item the web browser is looking for. One of the lamest excuses for imitation is that it’s flattering, but decades of Microsoft success prove you can’t “own” an idea.

If the store wanted to accessibly sell lawn chairs, it would maximize keyword efficiency.  But Target has left a window open for enterprising domainers. They can make a site featuring only those items inside the niche and save the shopper time, typing, and trouble. Any site that tries to encompass too broad an encyclopedia or catalog risks alienating visitors by this response failure. The elision of likely keywords from surgical results leaves the door open for enterprising web designers.

By shrinking the ugly cycle of scanning page of items after page of items at the store site, and waiting for all this to render, a site master can marry a city name or store name with an item to shop for and make a killer domain out of keywords they can optimize until the cows come home. This opportunity is available in markets heating up right now, like online coupons from sites like Dukky. Maybe users don’t want to wait for the next campaign and want the coupon now.

Why is this a domain development opportunity? Because a website owner of “Targetlawnchairs.com” could make a bunch of listings on the site and link them to the densely buried Target.com product listings. Surfing a densely niche targeted site for lawn chairs available at Target stores allows online discoverers to skip Search restarts and navigate back and forth through a million results.

Collecting information from online Web sources and redelivering it to the web visitor is not exactly rocket science. But it is webmaster science. Domainers can execute reasonable answers to online search query problems  and compose a likely site, and shrink the type in cycle for grateful web users. The traffic should tell the tale and  bring revenue and clicks.

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The domain buying and selling world functions on its own, but the channel where the real websites predict which domain names can become blockbuster successes is also an ongoing dynamic in the domain game online. If you want to get started buying a domain name without a full plan of attack for an application, service, product topic or subject, here are some domaining “Rules of the Road”.

1. People Like What’s Free

Using a domain name for a website with the word “free” in it is a guaranteed selling point. Not just for the eventual resale of the domain name, but for ads that feature the url. Many links directories will want to feature ads about free products, material, services or participation sites that allows visitors to enjoy themselves or get an object or solution for free.

Free hints, free tips, free explained coaching sessions, free videos, free ebooks, free coupons, free links or free downloads are things online users want. Access to a website with free objects can be sold. Free translations, free access to trial games or memberships, or free real world wares can be compelling attractors for any website. Launch of a free website is easy as word tends to get around.

2. Browsers Like Short Names

The age of the long complicated url with multiple subdirectories is over. unless you have a talent and an enthusiasm for assigning read rights to individual directories or furnishing vulnerabilities to your hosting files, just get and use a short domain for type in ease of use. Short domains never go out of style. For brandable sites, solutions, and apps, choose a portfolio short name and go from there.

Short names become a cute sexy brand name people enjoy saying and emailing to others. If it isn’t an easily spelled name or a catchy would-be nonsense  word (Google, Yahoo) put it back on the domain shelf. The name should “say” something. if it sounds like  a verb or an alien spacecraft, so be it. But if people can’t remember it and type it easily, it won’t matter.

3. Online Means Tech Names

Tech names and technology websites are the sites people go to t find out what certain terms mean or how to deal with computer issues. People want to know what terms or new words mean and how they apply to everyday uses of devices, communication, or work. Tech names that correspond to new technologies or knowledge banks tend to be very discoverable.

Technology is growing so rapidly in so many different directions it’s hard not to miss a niche in technology without really trying. Exact terms and related “store” or “info” tech domains can have huge discoverability and SEO profile altitude. Grabbing new terms or first adopter words, medical slang or industry jargon and making it into a domain is a smart domainer trend.

4. Users Want Shortcuts

In the computer manuals and the dictionary type descriptions of programming features or user issues bore people to death. If internet users suspect their is a much easier way to do something, they are willing to find the way to it online.

Finding shortcuts to other shortcuts makes a great website. The shortcut website makes a great bookmark reference. Making a solution website discoverable means spreading the tech around. Those long-winded explanations are for nerds with time on their hands. Real internet users want cheat cheat, printable forms and downloadable documents.

5. Online Researchers Want Answers

A domain name that stands for a website with material that provides a way to solve a problem or ease up on a pain point is a highly desirable and shareable website. the domain name becomes a talking point. Think about how many times a day people have conversations with other people who have the same problems they do. If they can share a website url, they will repeat your domain name a dozen times a day and sell the concept for you.

6. Updates

Any name with “update” or “news’ has huge SEO potential. The instant discoverability of dated content which is current and well written will be repeatedly selected by research users and curious browsers alike. Just expanding press releases, rewriting clumsily written articles, and condensing information reports into readable content will attract hordes of online users. News domains quickly and easily become traffic domains.

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Getting a blog launched takes time and effort. But usually by the time a domain gets a series of chronological entries up and behind it, the webmaster or chief blogger loses interest and the new additions die away. This is why SEO researchers get stranded at forgotten blogs and websites that haven’t been updated for months or years. But SEO is what bloggers must keep doing to get noticed and attract new readers.

Methods to a better blog might just be a bracing checklist away. When the initial zest to write reams and reams of opinionated content start to pall, responsible bloggers and competent webmasters buck up. Use a different strategy every day to change things up for your SEO discoverability. Just reworking the responses and presentation of many of the below items can form the basis of a complete blog post or article.

1. Check the News

Every morning or at night check the news related to the key technologies or subjects related to your blog. Google the words or devices, subject words and “news”. The news articles approved by media outlets can give only the bare bones sketch of important news events, often written by editors who may not know as much as a webmaster or site owner about the topic or the principals involved.

Put some ballast in the tanks and report a more robust news story, and search engines and other webmasters will find your content and check back. Do some searches on your own and come up with supplemental material the news editors or reporters couldn’t be bothered to add. Deadline news writers for print and web media are seldom as up to date as the blogs and sites that follow the individuals or event concerned.

2. Slurp the Feeds

RSS news feeds often contain hastily rewritten or cribbed text content grabbed form press releases and other sources. RSS feeds are made to be fed to eager listeners while they drive to work, jog or do their chores. But a more in-depth treatment of the news article with additional information, expanded details and more sources amplifies the content.

News feeds were designed to populate sites with content that mirrored the topics and subject matter to a limited extent. But with the extent to which news feeds are utilized for templates and minisites, they may have lost a great deal of SEO value for site discoverability. Include the dates and times in the top of your posts so readers can check the timeliness of the reports before they read.

3. Browse the Forums

Forums are an excellent investigative source of how the herd who pays attention to any one type of blog subject will move. Does everyone want the next level development, or do they want things to stay the way they are? Why do some users feel one way and others encourage another point of view? Forums are touchstones where new ideas and groundswell support for a movement can happen in a flash.

Forums rise and fall dependent on their user shifts. See what types of users are moving in new directions. See what the savviest users are saying and take a bead on the conventional wisdom. See the places they talk about online where they get news and information. Those are road maps for sites to go to learn more about your topics and keyword article material.

4. Do the Rewrite Right

Rewrites that are repurposed jumbles of meaningless text don’t benefit anyone, certainly not the SEO value of the site. Webmasters who get fooled by these approaches often wait for search engine results and discoverability that never happens. Rewrites with fresh information and modern points of view appeal to readers trying to get a grip on the snapshot view of the topic.

But often magazines and journals have extremely outdated findings and conclusions. Writing an updated treatment of such an article bears the stamp of web journalism because it allows an online reader to see the history of a topic and its new directions at the same time. The SEO value moves downstream to the new sources of data on the subject, and upstream to the links that forged the progress the text articulates.

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The purposeful promotion of a domain name via a website takes work. When the domain investment nears payoff, the website has been completed. This is the end of the road. The next step is to prepare a price estimate for sale. This is when the mining of stats and the reporting of tracked links can be used to derive a auction price or private sale price for the domain name.

Then notifications, listings, and threads in domain forums occur for the creative marketing of the domain name to a motivated buyer for a resale. In the best case scenario, the added value and utility of the web directory and the hits recorded for the current content will combine to form a potent and re-usable entity for further website success and profit creation.

The road to a profitable website and url resale might be said to require a static amount of work. But the domain name professional grooms multiple websites at once for best results. These efforts  make the webmaster look to find ways to minimize effort on the promotion side and maximize return on the advertising and click through side.

Any way that a webmaster can create marketable effort and interest online for potential visitors will return value. A website can sell a product or an idea, or guide other visitors to follow. A visitor can enjoy cartoons, witty snippets, or download documents and files. The experience is what they remember.

If the keywords and topics for the websites are congruent and/or similar the multiplicity of the submission effort for links and articles becomes streamlined. One the quickest ways to get a blog degraded in value via the comment analysis tool is to include comments that are spam. The comments from visitors with return urls and trackback site destinations with similar keywords are ideal. But this practice does not always operate within acceptably realistic usage parameters.

Is it likely that a person looking to promote their blog or website will be looking at blogs or websites with topical subjects, articles and images not related to their own website content? Of course! Posts by other webmasters visiting your website are surgical strikes at your SEO ranking. But that link can’t post back to new content that never gets created! Website work keeps new posts churning. Sequence the article publication using the calendar.

Your site has to offer something or it will miss out on a big type of web promotion. Site reviews are generated by the quality of an experience a web user has at a particular site. Positive or negative rankings still build buzz and SEO value for a website. Even product reviews of vaguely related gadgets give researchers and consumers a reason to find your site and check it out.

Many online sites function as repositories where the reviews can be optimized for SEO discoverability eternal to your site. Website work accomplishes this pursuant to a strategy. But the reference url will link directly to your site.  The top page must be integrated with the site plan. What will the bots see?

Bots scrub a site for indexed content including image tags, titles, code names and database titles. Content doesn’t have to be bombastic and long winded text blocks (ahem) but can be cartoons, humorous snippets, reactions to industry news and coverage of industry and topical events.

Webmasters who say they have no times  for their abandoned blog are lying. Copying and pasting a news article with one or two introductory sentences, replying to a couple comments, and putting in one link in the web link area takes 5 minutes. No updated posts for months means the blog owner wouldn’t or didn’t take 5 minutes on any one day to improve their site. Website work requires some time at least once a week.

Referencing responsibly is another key concept many bloggers and webmasters miss out on. If there is a story, blurb, or post about an individual or an organization, make sure to include somewhere in the text the personal or corporate website for that individual or organization. Don’t like the source item? Find the press release or original link it was written from and do it better!

Website work included upgrading graphics, link building, article submission, evangelizing, forum posting, and more. Writing new content, gathering news and information, and reviewing other sites for tips and tricks enables a competent webmaster to optimize their site for SEO analysis and visitor perusal. With ads to choose, an audience to build, and complete freedom to design the website, a webmaster’s work is never done.

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The war for domainers to get fresh content has never been more fierce.  Forums and online boards have listings and competitive freelancers vying for business.  Whether or not you are in the market,  if you have time review the article in Time magazine this week about Demand media.

But the actual search engine optimization results are not really shown in the article. And it’s hard to ask domainers to shell out big bucks for content they don’t know will result in traffic.

But what need does the public have for such content? Man content writers will tell you about curious assignments for rewrites and content topics released and assigned in an unusual schedule or within a confined cycle of production days. Many content writers have suspected they were used to produce material resold to Demand Media or other content farms without their knowledge. The demand for fresh content churns the content “machine”.

But is the Time article for the public or for the website administrative community? Time may be getting the word out to newbs via its article, but domain name buyers and sellers have known for some time that algorhythm driven content does not always result in traffic. It can help domainers come up with assignments for end user data, but it cannot leverage results.

The line between web journalism and algorhythmic artificial production of content has been further blurred. The relationship between humanistic writing and business goal text production is a definition many domainers still get confused about. Bots and scrubbers do not click on ads, but they do produce content and SEO reports. Time’s article suggest that companies like Demand Media fill in the blank.

Demand Media is a “content farm”, a bulk output source for article and text for websites on every topic. A content provider startup that seems to be working in the forefront of article generation for website content, Demand Media is profiled as a cultural synthesis of business and technology.

The horde of online freelancers looking for content work is hardly news to domainers. But what’s missing from the Time article is one tiny little fact: however many algorhythms work to predict most lucrative keywords, it is human interest and human inquiry which drive ad clicking and offer pursuit on the visitor side of any website. As long as this stays constant on the internet, then the humanistic contribution cannot be overvalued.

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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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