Jennlog

One of my 2008 resolutions is seeking out and developing more partnerships with people and companies.

I’ve been operating websites since 1994. Not as long as some, but early enough that I have acquired a few domain names. Most of the names below were registered as "Web 1.0" projects that came and went as companies or projects that were started, acquired or dissolved.

During the last year, I’ve developed (I think) a more cooperative view about the creation of websites and Internet-directed efforts. I have witnessed the excitement in spontaneity and strength of teams as people join and participate in Startup Weekends around the world. I have servers, I have domain names and I have some experience with Internet stuff — let’s talk about creating something new.

Yallery is my primary focus and has been my full-time job for almost two years. While it is still a few months away from an unrestricted launch, I’ve been working on tour.net and ShowMedia to figure out and learn some technical and programming stuff to bring back to Yallery. I would love to work with others on turning the domains below into useful, prosperous products and/or services. Email me at jenn@jenn.com or leave a comment below. (Truth be told, I’m also interested in speaking with developers and designers who may wish to get involved at an equity level in Yallery, tour.net and ShowMedia.)

This post is an invitation to start a dialog with marketing and technical folks about working together on new ideas. This post is not an invitation for “domainers” to tell me about a great google/yahoo ad parking scheme.

On Tuesday November 6th, I received an email from someone (Let’s call him “Mr. X”*) regarding a domain name I’ve owned since the mid-90s. The contents of the email were basically something to the effect of “I see you have a domain name that is the same name as my company, which operates nationally and rather than sue you I want to offer you $3000.00 now.”

Mr. X had apparently been told by his attorneys that the domain name I had owned since the mid-90s, operated a website on for most of 1995 and was planning to launch a new site on in the upcoming months was rightfully his.

My first reaction to this email was to laugh hysterically. And then I started to do some research.

I visited his company’s website. On the splash page of this website, it says that the company was founded in 1998 by Mr. X.

Next, based on previous experience with litigious domain coveters, I figured anyone threatening to sue on the first email has to have filed a trademark application sometime recently — So I visited the USPTO and found a registration submitted by Mr. X on August 15th 2007 — claiming a “FIRST USE” and “FIRST USE IN COMMERCE” date of August 26, 1999.

So, Mr. X either started his company in 1998 or 1999 depending on the source you visit.

Incidentally, I transferred the domain in question to my holding company on February 7th 1997 by changing the name on the registration. This is the current date of “Record Creation” in the InterNIC Whois database, though I have copies of the original date of registration on file.

Regardless, this would document my ownership of the domain name a good one or two years before Mr. X started his business.

Clearly Mr. X’s counsel messed up their advice. After a few back and forth emails, I apologized for my flip responses to his threats and Mr. X apologized and admitted that he had received bad advice.

Had Mr. X followed through on his threat to sue, he would very likely have been found guilty of a type of bad faith action called Reverse Domain Hijacking.

I have negotiated with Mr. X’s people to sell the domain name to Mr. X, but it would seem his efficient and authoritative legal team may wish to make a broadway production out of what is really a small transaction compared to my previous domain name sales.

* Recently, I Googled Mr. X and learned he is probably worth hundreds of Millions of dollars as a successful entrepreneur, investor and real estate developer.

Web comment spammers discovered my Honorary Canadian Citizenship Certificate Generator last summer. So I hacked together a little 4-line dictionary-based perl filter and added it to my code to divert these attempts to a file that would list each prevented attempt.

I last rotated that file on August 1, 2006 so as of today, I have exactly one year’s worth of spam attempts (give or take a number of false triggers). The total number of attempts is: 11616.

It’s kind of scary to think about what 11616 webspams looks like across 12 months in comparison to the legitimate traffic I host through that site. I deleted my Movable Type blog in 2003 after only 500 spams and that was just over the top.

I’m convinced that if Google Ad Words didn’t encourage “domainers” to camp on domain names featuring fake portals, there would be no web comment spam trying to drive up the Google “Page Rank” of those fake portals. Google is perpetuating this evil.

The Domaintools blog has a post dated July 1st, lamenting the potential income that various banks and finance companies are losing by not resolving their generic names.

They provide homeloans.com and retire.com as examples of addresses that could “generate several thousands of dollars” if they were “parked” (aka place website advertising billboards designed to appear like webportals on the addresses and generate ad revenue from every “stumble view”). Alternately, they suggest redirecting the sites to the owner’s primary sites which would provide millions of dollars in lost referral revenue.

As a web user and 13-year domain name owner, the fact that 99% of domain names registered today are returned within a 5-day refund window by domain tasters because they learn the site can’t earn enough ad revenue from stumble views to recoup the registration fee ($6 or so) pisses me off.

Of the remaining one percent, I’m guessing that 99% of those completed registrations are by these ad portal “domainers” who are betting that they can make a better return on the name than $6.

Chances are, if you owned a website in the last 10 years and let the domain registration lapse, one of these parasitic ad portals now greets visitors at your old address. The “domainer” is collecting ad revenue from stumble views generated by visitors who thought your website was still there based upon the lingering links from other sites.

I think “domainers” should be paying for the significant resources they waste while testing if a domain can attract more than $6 worth of ad revenue from “stumble views”. Tens of millions of spurious registrations and deletions are happening every month and the cost of this infrastructure is paid for by all domain registrants — the majority of whom feel lucky enough to have been able to register a name that approximates their business name, product, service, personal name or some aspect of their personality.

I wish the Web wasn’t being clear cut only to be replaced with millions of ad billboards, but with Google, Yahoo and other opportunistic ad services feeding the ad billboard and “stumble view revenue” business models and mentality, we’re going to end up with one nasty noisy web full of meaningless ad portals.

What does this have to do with the banks and finance companies with the “wasted great generic domains”? There is no such thing as a wasted domain.

The silence of a 404 is much more comforting to me than ad billboards that waste my time with crap. Hopefully, one day someone will develop a tool to engineer all of this web pollution out and away from the browsing experience.

When I launched my first web-based business on the Internet in the early ’90s, I requested (you didn’t purchase domain names back then) about a dozen domain names from InterNIC. I held onto them as other parts of my business went elsewhere in the mid-90s and I’ve sold a couple of them in recent years as opportunities present themelves.

Lately, I’ve been putting out feelers for someone to purchase tour.net from me so I can pay down my seed capital-providing credit cards.

It appears as though “Domain Names” are the latest get rich quick scheme on the Internet. I’ve heard radio commercials suggesting that people should get in on the ground floor of the “Domain Name Market” while they can. Domain Names are now the fastest, easiest, greatest way to make boatloads of cash on the Internet according to these folks. There’s no interest in tour.net yet, but I’ve have random people offer me 6-figures for jenn.com, and 5-figures for jenn.us, presumably for porn ads.

Domain names used to be about the branding. It sucks to see that the most acceptable source of income for “domainers” is the advertising cash generated by diverting the eyeballs and clicks of visitors stumbling upon their incorrectly spelled derivations of popular web business names or millions of dictionary-based words that host an ocean of useless advertising “link portals.”

What is the Web going to look like in three years when there are 300 million ad pages located at the root of 300 million domain names, registered and maintained with the sole purpose of being annoying web-side billboards stealing chance glances from people aiming for other addresses?

I predict there will be some old-fashioned Internet urban-renewal required in the future.