May 2009 Archives

I am a strong advocate of the new TLD process that is currently ongoing in the ICANN community and it is something that will be central to the discussions in the upcoming meeting in Sydney.

One of the areas that I feel particularly strong about is privacy for registrants.

If you register a co.uk domain or a .eu domain as a private individual you can choose to hide your contact information in whois. What that means is that your contact details remain private, as long as you are a private individual. If you are a business user, then you should be displaying your contact information, as is mandated by various EU directives (it also makes sense for consumers to know who is behind a website).

Unfortunately in the gTLD world (ie. com/net/org/info/biz) the whois data is not private, so any information you supply during domain registration will be viewable.

Enter .tel.

With the launch of .tel the landscape for gTLDs changed slightly and it is now possible for a private individual to "opt out" of whois when they register .tel domains.

Great news!

So what of the new TLDs? Will they be able to offer private registrants that same level of privacy?

I would have liked to think that they would be able to, especially as several of the new TLD projects are aimed at providing domain name services for cultural and ethnic groups, such as the Basques, Scots and Bretons (to name a few).

Unfortunately the intellectual property advocates would appear to hold their rights to be of greater importance than those of private citizens' right to privacy.

As part of the new TLD process the IRT report, which was published a couple of days ago, looked at the issue of registrant privacy, but basically swept it under the carpet, as it did not fit with their view of how whois should work.

Hopefully the ICANN board and other actors will have the foresight to see past their blinkered recommendations and allow new registry operators to give domain registrants the same rights to privacy as the cctld operators already do.

There is currently a public comment period open on this very subject, so I would urge people to take a few minutes to submit their views.

For a longer rant on why I personally feel that the IRT report is fundamentally flawed see my post here .

Related articles by Zemanta

• ICANN IRT Report Open For Comment With Short Timeframe (isquattedyour.eu)
• Blacknight Goes Down Under (blacknight.com)

As some people may know we also run Irish ISP Test, which has been providing Irish (and international) broadband users with a speed test service for the last few years.

Earlier this week we were delighted to welcome Magnet's official representative to the site. Hopefully he'll be able to assist users (and potential users) of Magnet's services.

Of course, if any other ISP wants an official representative on the site we'd welcome them.

This Monday, 1st June 2009, is a bank holiday in Ireland. As a result of this our sales and billing teams will be enjoying the nice weather (presuming it lasts!)

The IE Domain Registry will be closed on Monday, so no new registrations will be processed fully - they can, of course, be queued.

Our technical support team will be available to assist our clients like on any other bank holiday Monday

I'll keep this short, sweet and to the point.

Tomorrow morning we will be upgrading the hardware on several or our web servers.

If your site is hosted on any of the affected servers there will be some downtime - probably less than a minute, but possibly longer.

Full details are over on our technical status site - we recommend you subscribe to it for updates and notifications.

Several of our clients have been in touch with us recently regarding yet another scam.

At least one company is targetting small businesses offering them "guaranteed first page position on Google".

To make matters worse they're also claiming to have a special relationship with Google.

Now don't get me wrong, there are plenty of reputable companies offering both search engine optimisation and search engine marketing services. However, it's when a company offers these kind of silly guarantees that I get rather annoyed.

Getting your site onto the front page of Google for certain keywords and phrases is possible, but it takes a lot of work, unless your niche is incredibly small and uncompetitive.

If you get an offer that sounds simply "too good to be true", then it probably is.

Sales people will always try to tell you that their product or service is amazing - it's what they're paid to do. Don't just take their word for it. Ask around.

If nobody has heard of them chances are they aren't as "wonderful" as they might like you to believe.

Milestones are great, especially when you least expect them.

Earlier today I logged into our Eurid account to check some figures and saw this:



We're now the largest Eurid accredited registrar in Ireland and climbing up the overall charts steadily (we've still got a long way to go globally!)

As some people were asking I'm making available the slides from the session this afternoon on online brand protection.

As you can see my slides aren't particularly long or detailed, but hopefully people will get some idea of what I was talking about

Questions / comments welcome as always.

domains-iia-blacknight-2009.ppt

Related articles by Zemanta

• Protect Your Brand Globally - IIA Congress 2009 (blacknight.com)

Due to demand vs. supply we had to stop selling Linux based VPS servers a few days ago. It's nice problem to have!

In any case they're available again now, as we put in a few more hardware nodes.

You can check out the various Linux powered VPS over here

As part of the IIA Congress this week I'll be involved in one of the afternoon "breakout" sessions:

Protect Your Brand Globally

The session, which is sponsored by Eurid, will involve registry operators (Eurid), registrars (Blacknight) and the legal profession (Matheson Ormsby Prentice).

What will we be talking about?

In broad terms it's all about domains, registering domains, protecting your brand online and related topics.

The upcoming launch of new top level domains, for example, is a topic that brand owners should be aware of.

I haven't finalised my slides for it yet, so if anyone wants a particular topic covered feel free to leave a comment below and I'll try to facilitate it.


So if you're at the IIA Congress why not drop by, as the session will be run a few times in the afternoon.

Next month sees the 35th public ICANN meeting being held in Sydney, Australia.

I've been going to the public meetings as often as I can over the last couple of years and find them to be a fantastic opportunity to get involved with global policy development.

All the ICANN meetings are 100% free thanks to the sponsors, so I am delighted to announce that we are doing our bit for the Sydney meeting and are a bronze sponsor!

I'll be at the ICANN meeting for the week, so if anyone wants to meetup please let me know

Following on from some random chatter on Twitter earlier this evening it's become apparent that some people would be interested in training..

Training on what though?

Well that's really up to you...

Obvious topics that could be considered:

• the control panel
• Plesk
• dns basics
• domain basics (and maybe more advanced topics?)

So would people be interested in a training session with Blacknight staff (and maybe others) on these or other topics?

Please leave a comment if you are interested.

If there's enough interest then we can start working on the practical details. If there's no interest we'll dump the idea and move on

UPDATE:
Since our clients are spread across Ireland and the globe we're thinking that it would make more sense to run the training as a webinar using something like webex.

UPDATE 2: I've created a poll on our forum so that people can choose the best time that suits them

We love getting feedback from people and while we may not always reply or act on it, we do listen and read it all.

So it's only fair that we share one user's vision for our website. Admittedly it's a bit biased, but I thought we'd share it anyway ...

Well what do you think? Apart from it needing a bit of cleaning up around the edges, do you think it would work?

If you're using Windows have you upgraded to the latest version of Internet Explorer?

Internet Explorer version 8 brings a whole range of new features, while also addressing some of the problems that earlier versions of the software had.
You can download it from this page on the Microsoft Ireland site.

Is it easier for developers to work with?

IQContent have been running their Bootcamp event for the last few years and the lineup yet again this year looks really impressive.

Topics that they'll be covering include:

• Web Strategy
• Web Content
• User Experience and Design
• Online Marketing
• Technology

Why do I mention this? Well they gave us a really nice deal to offer our clients..

Use the coupon code: Blacknight when signing up and they'll give you 20% off

Not bad eh?

Our technical team are always working on new and cool things behind the scenes.

The latest project to bear fruit is the launch of Windows Server 2008 with IIS7 on our shared hosting.

What does it give you?

The hosting plans are identical to the Server 2003 versions, but instead of IIS6 you get IIS7 basically.

Php on Windows Server 2008 with IIS7 is meant to work a lot better and there are other improvements and options that ASP.net developers will appreciate.

So to celebrate this launch we're doing a nice little special offer.

The first 100 signups for our new Windows Server 2008 Minimus plans will get a 20 euro discount (no coupons required). So you can get all the power of Server 2008, IIS7 and all the other features we offer as standard for a mere EUR 29.95 for the first year!!

How do you get this offer?

Just signup online - remember to choose the Windows 2008 / IIS7 option from the dropdown and the discount will automatically be applied.

The small print: The offer is valid only for the first 100 signups. Offer only applicable on annual signups for Minimus plans using Windows 2008 / IIS7

When ICANN announced at its June meeting last year that it was "opening up" for new TLDs it made a public commitment that it was going to have hard time following through on.

The latest announcement tries to put a data on the first round of new TLD applications - Q1 2010.

That's hardly a big surprise, though for some following the new TLD project it might seem overly optimistic.

And the application guidebook will be the main topic of discussion during the Sydney meeting by the looks of things.

We have been contacted by several of our clients who have received letters from Domain Renewal Group.

These letters are NOT genuine.

DO NOT act on them.

Please bin them.

Example letter below:
You'll notice that the prices they mention are significantly higher than what we charge

The co.uk registry operator, Nominet, has enabled a new feature to help fight phishing and other domain abuse.

The new "Phishing Lock" enables registrars, such as ourselves, to lockdown domains suspected of abusive use eg. phishing etc.,

A domain may now be marked as being used in abusive activities and completely locked down to prevent dns changes etc.,

More details on the Nominet site

This weekend's edition of Computers in Business, which is the IT supplement for the Irish Sunday newspaper, The Sunday Business Post, featured us a couple of times. I was also quoted in Saturday's Independent.

Unfortunately neither the article on LinkedIn or the one on domains is available online. As I wrote the LinkedIn article I will probably publish it on my personal site later today...

DotMobi have released a very cool suite of Wordpress tools to help Wordpress users make their .mobi Wordpress sites mobile ready (ie. so that they pass the ready.mobi test)

The plugin looks like it has pretty much everything to make your .mobi site completely mobile ready and friendly:

• Mobile switcher to detect mobile visitors and provide an appropriate experience
• Base mobile theme for quick-and-easy XHTML-MP compliance
• Extended mobile themes so you can unleash your mobile creativity
• Transcoding and device adaptation to optimise the mobile experience
• DeviceAtlas integration for world-class adaptation
• Mobile admin panel for when posts can't wait
• Mobile ad widget to make you some money (you can choose between Adsense and Admob)
  
• Barcode widget to help users bookmark your blog

NB: Your Wordpress site will need to be running on php5 in order for this to work

Full details on the dotMobi developer site

If you don't have a .mobi domain, then why not get one now?

On a related note, dotMobi CEO Trey Harvin is shortlisted for an IIA NetVisionary award, so why not vote for him now? Voting closes today