Domainer's Gazette-Home

I’m high on geo-domains these days.. Mainly for the development potential. From a ‘building business’ perspective, it’s pretty darn easy to establish instant credibility if you mention you’re from, say, ‘TellurideColorado.com’..

After grabbing a beer today with Charles from Snowcap Labs (thanks for the beer Charles), I came home to Rick Latona’s Daily Domains email.. he’s been serving up some gems lately, and today he served up one I began instantly chewing on..

Gadsden.com — for $19K — not a bad price in my book, really..

Gadsden Alabama is only a short trek away from Atlanta, and has a population over 100,000 - which means there’s plenty of small business advertisers who’d possibly be interested in advertising on a local blog/resource..

So I began digging.. What’s Gadsden like? There a college there? Industry?

Before I even got started, I stopped.

Why?

Cause of Rand McNally.

In 1989, Rand McNally listed Gadsden as one of the “Seven Worst Cities to Live in the United States.” (per wikipedia)..

oye..

A fantastic domain name? Yes, no doubt. Potential? Definitely.

For me? eh… I’d rather build an empire on - at least - the 8th worst or better city in the U.S. ….

The Yahoo homepage tends to be my primary news source throughout the day, as I’m always checking email, or testing PPC campaigns running on the YSM network..

Today, they featured a video titled ” ‘Big Mother’ is watching “, and described it as “A new website lets parents track their kids’ grades, absences, and tardies.” (see below)

Being that I’m a data hound, and love business models which revolve around selling information - not products, I clicked the play button.

What came next, caused me to do a triple take..

Actually, take a look for yourself. Here’s the video:

did ya catch it?

The site they featured as the homepage for Parent Connect? Did the template look familiar?

It should, cause it’s Frank Schilling domain name, and it’s his website they’re featuring (incorrectly). See below screenshot:

The wordly-wise producers of this segment assumed their domain was ParentConnect.com - Which it ain’t.

It appears that the actual product name is ‘Parent Connect XP’..

And that’s not even the end of the story…

The originating company which owns and operates Parent Connect XP (Pearson Education), owns ParentConnectXP.com, but prefers to have the name resolve nowhere (currently brings up a ‘Server not found’ page’), and instead opts to provide all the product specs buried within their root site here. It’s so buried, a Google search for ‘Parent Connect XP’ fails to even generate this page..

That being said, I can’t halfway blame the producers… can you?

I wonder if Frank noticed any traffic spikes on his side : )

I’m trying to get my hands around Macromedia Fireworks, and hacking away testing it’s features..

cutting, pasting, modifying, stretching, zooming, … you get the point.

As an exercise, I decided to drop in all the domainer blogs and publication logos out there, and mess around with those..

rather than delete my newbie masterpiece, I thought I’d dump here (as I tend to dump all my research here as well)

how about that fancy cropping on the ricklatona logo.. classy.

my apologies to elliot, frank, and modern domainer, as their logos are a bit grainy - had a bit of stretching issues.

oh, and whoops, what do you know, DG got the biggest logo..

I mentioned it a few months back, but it’s now official.

DomainerCon

…a domainer networking conference.

and it’s free. Just register and show up. (See the site for all the details)

We’re tentatively scheduling it from 5-7pm, but chances are it’ll last longer than that.

Why don’t you drop by, say hello?

in no specific order:

• For the most part, .ws .biz and .cc domains are worthless.
• SEO domaining is not easy. I’m not saying this to discourage competitors. I’m saying it cause it’s starting to beat me, rather than me it.
• Network Solutions sucks.
• There are too many domaining blogs that report ‘breaking news’. If you hit Domaining.com at the right moment, a large percentage of the headlines will read the exact same thing.
• Monte Cahn likes bowling shirts (with the Moniker logo stitched in).
     
• When you buy a domain direct, if at all possible, create your own account at the same registrar. Why? Transferring into another account usually takes a few hours. Transferring away, to another registrar, takes up to 5 days. In other words, 5 days for the seller to get cold feet and back out.
• The more I domain, the more I like Geo names.
• Ron Jackson, of DN Journal, works his butt off and should be thanked by every domainer for his efforts.
• And since we’re on Ron, I wish he’s only sell static ads on his site. There’s only so many swirling, swooshing, rotating, flashing ads my brain can register. (I just counted 15 on his homepage)..don’t get mad Ron, I’m just sayin’…
• Domainers LOVE conferences.

And finally -

• Domainers, for the most part, like to live 1. near a beach, or 2. in Canada.

..so, do you domain? what have you learned?

seems their design team decided to test their homepage layout in IE, and only IE…

now, Firefox is wreaking havoc, and re-written their homepage slogan to:

“You want a career that’s ORDINARY”

Ok, only if you say so..

and to think these jokers also own TravelNurse.com too… oye.