Larien is correct. The changes indicate infrastructure shifts at domain registrars, specifically Network Solutions and Namezero (as alluded to in this Netcraft post from 2003 and this one from 2001. Both briefly shifted from Solaris to Windows, and then back again.
Station Exchange (Sony's official Everquest auction site) likely won't be the only sanctioned auction service for very long. By only enabling it on certain servers, it enables users to choose whether they want to play in an environment where a players' financial power can determine their advancement in the game, or a pure "amateur" environment. Prior to Station Exchange, players who are buying assets on IGE or eBay (and there's plenty of them) would be spread across many servers. In theory, these players would now be likely to switch to the Station Exchange servers. Does that take the "cheaters" off the other servers, making for fairer play for remaining players?
A big question is whether major MMOGs evolve along a two-track path, with commercial and con-commercial servers for each world. The Terra Nova blog has had numerous discussions of this topic.
There are a number of services emerging to offer price information on online games. I've put together a list of links for anyone interested. Initially, most of the services offering pricing info on MMOG assets based their data on sales they aggregated on eBay. Among these are Advanced Economic Research Systems, which has been quoted in a lot of news stories about the dollar volume of game asset trading on eBay. These services usually involved fees. There are also desktop software products that can generate detailed reports from eBay information.
Auction sites like IGE offer affiliate programs, allowing gaming web sites to make cash by referring potential buyers. This may become the business model for Eye on MOGs and similar sites. Several sites have offered Everquest info for some time, including EQEcon and EQ Prices, although I gather they're less critical since Sony opened its new "official" auctions at Station Exchange.
Two-factor authentication was a big part of the recent eBay-VeriSign deal. The headlines all mentioned eBay buying VeriSign's payment processing unit for $370 Million. But the agreement also calls for eBay to buy up to 1 million two-factor authentication tokens from VeriSign for use on Paypal. eBay will start rolling out the two-factor authentication tokens to Paypal and eBay users in 2006, including marketing and security programs designed to "promote customer adoption."
This is significant, since you have a lot more phishing attacks targeting Paypal and eBay than the major banks these days.
About a year ago the.info central registry, Afilias, began offering the domains free to registrars - who could then charge for them or give them away. A unit of eNom registered more than a million.info names "on behalf of" their existing.com and.net customers. Soon after Dotster followed suit with about 350,000 more. The one-year free registration period on these.info names is now expiring, and a bunch are being deleted as a result.
Anyone who has the skills to write a marketable blog will see what AOL paid Jason Calcanis, get dollar signs in their eyes, and leap into the blog network game.
Many will fail. There was already a casualty this week, as Webby Media shut down just nine days after launching. Their business plan: give away 100% of ad revenue to bloggers. Doh!
There are now blogs emerging that do nothing but cover these blog networks, like the newly-launched Blog Network Watch or Blogebrity.
There's lots of free sites and services that make domain management and brand protection easier than ever. Services like Whois Source and DomainsBot make it easier than ever to know which domains are taken and available. You can search on names, keywords and phrases to see what's available across major top-level domains (.com,.net,.org,.biz. and.info) or use the "name spinner" options that suggest names that may be of interest.
Domains are a business asset. You need to take the time to understand them - which the initial submitter clearly has not. If a domain name you want has already been registered, be prepared to spend a lot of time and/or money to acquire it, either through the UDRP appeal process or "drop catching" (buying an expiring domain name as it is deleted from the registrar's system) which nowadays is really a game for professionals.
The blog is as good as the author or idea behind it. The hot trend in blogging is the growth of business-related niche blogs written by a trained journalist who has bailed from their job at a daily newspaper of trade journal. Blog software, and the emerging business models based on Google AdSense make it easier than ever to be a stand-alone journalist (a term coined by Chris Nolan) and earn a decent living.
The NY Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and San Jose Mercury News all announced staff layoffs last week. Where do you think those folks are going? To the Web, to eat their former employers' collective lunches. Lots of these folks have real expertise, and are bringing their contacts and rolodexes with them.
I speak from experience. I took the plunge in 2000. I was the computer-assisted reporting director at a daily newspaper that was clueless about the future of the web, and unwilling to invest in the basics (e-mail for repoters... doh!). So I left to write for technology sites, and have been doing it ever since.
Studies of LiveJournal find that most of these sites are used for personal communications, to share stuff with a small circle of friends and family. Sure, it's easy to poke fun at the stereotype of here's-what-my-cat-did-today blogs penned by teenage girls, but major blog tools are adapting to reflect the priorities of this style of blogging/journaling.
Look at Six Apart's next-generation blogging tool, Project Comet. It emphasizes not only sharing, but also ways to limit access to a small group.
In the US there appear to be a bunch of trademark applications either related to Linux or using the phrase. The only one for "Linux" (stand-alone) appears to be a 1999 application for laundry detergent from a Swiss company. I'm not a lawyer or patent expert, but I gather other Slashdot readers may know more on the status/history of "Linux" trademarks here in the US, where the patent office often seems to approve applications without particularly thorough investigation or prior usage.
When an affiliate-driven industry begins to experience slower growth, it usually responds by spending more money on marketing to acquire new customers... which might in turn boost the affiliate payouts for the eleventy million poker blogs running Party Poker ads. It's not a slump, it's just a redistribution of wealth from shareholders to bloggers!
Wil Weaton figured out that a lot of his long-time readers feel the same way about his poker posts, and recently moved all his poker blogging to CardSquad, the Weblogs Inc. poker blog.
And yes, the poker comment spam is out of control. It's all driven by botnets. My blogs periodically get hit by these crapfloods, and you see the exact same comment or trackback sent to 25 posts from 20 different IP addresses in a couple minutes. Not hard to figure out... just a pain to defend and clean up.
Lots of casinos never promoted poker for this reason. The skill factor left the house without a profitable angle beyond the rake, and they made more money on black jack and other suckers' games.
But they're adapting. I was at the Borgata in Atlantic City last week, where they have tables for "Texas Hold 'Em BONUS," in which the casino has altered the betting rules to favor the house. There are other players, but you all play against the dealer, and have a $5 ante and $5 minimum bet on each round (flop, turn, river) to continue. It essentially takes Hold Em and structures it like a black jack game, complete with the house advantage. I guess it's the casinos' strategy to capitalize on the popularity of Hold 'Em while taking the skill out of the game.
A lot of the deletions of ad-tracking cookies are tied to growing use of anti-spyware programs like AdAware, which typically flag a lot of adware cookies as potential problems. Most folks follow the "when in doubt, delete" philosophy with cookies found by AdAware and similar programs. I'd wager very few people will try to sort out their merit on a cookie-by-cookie basis.
The new version 6.0 of the Zone Alarm Pro firewall also includes an anti-spyware capacity, which runs automatic scans at set intervals. The default setting is to automatically delete tracking cookies. That's bound to mean more cookie deletions, as Zone Alarm is widely used.
"Fraudsters have exploited a flaw in the eBay web site that allows them to orchestrate phishing attacks using eBay's own Sign In page.... By including special parameters at the end of the URL, the fraudster has changed the behaviour of the Sign In page so that when a user successfully logs in, they will then be sent to the fraudster's phishing site via an open redirect hosted on servlet.ebay.com."
Because of the "borrowing" of ebay's web site, the EBay toolbar reports the phishing site as legit.
IBM today unveiled a chilled water cooling system to manage heat loads for high-density cabinets using its eServer cluster products. It's been dubbed "Cool Blue." The debate about water cooling in the data center is a heated one (for a conversation about cooling) and has been discussed here before. Amid all the other strategies mentioned here, it's interesting to see Big Blue touting water cooling.
The domain parking revenue services often use cross-linking between the thousands of domains they control to improve their Google rankings. Speculators buy expiring domains, paying extra to get names with high Google PageRank. The aggregators like Sedo and Domain Sponsor use pretty advanced search engine optimization strategies to drive traffic to these pages.
Like email spam, these sites will continue to exist so long as people click on the links, thus supporting the business model.
A key question is how the ruling guides Hollywood's legal strategy in trying to halt piracy via P2P Networks. The ruling seems to make it easier for RIAA/MPAA to tie up developers of P2P software in lengthy court battles, which now have to be fought on the specifics of how a product is marketed and used, rather than the liability for piracy resting with the end-user infringer.
It looks like the Supreme Court has handed Hollywood a club, and they've shown their willingness to use it.
Will someone at CNet please tell my kids they have to choose between the PC and next-gen consoles? I don't know about your house, but we've got Xbox, GameCube and Playstation 2 here, and both my sons are furiously manufacturing chores so they can earn spending money for upgraded graphics cards - all the better to run World of Warcraft and the Sims 2 on their PCs.
Most families with serious gamers will have seriously pimped-out PCs with multiple consoles as well. That will be true in the next generation of consoles as well.
Yes, it's a bad idea, for the many reasons outlined in other posts. But expect to see frenzied bidding for these domains when they go on sale. Adult sites have always been big buyers of domains to generate traffic for their sites. Even if most porn operators don't want to do business within the.xxx TLD (where they can be easily filtered), they may want to own the.xxx domains associated with their "brands." Wanne-be porn kings may also see the sale of the new domains as an opportunity to make a landgrab.
I read a lot of "corporate" blogs, and I think it's pretty easy to spot the ones that understand blogging, those that are chasing the bandwagon. Blogs are a really effective tool for sharing business expertise in a way that builds relationships with potential customers and partners. They work well because they're different from the tired old approaches to sales/marketing communications. The key is to talk about your industry using an authentic voice rather than marketing-speak. Some enlightened companies are figuring that out and making effective use of blogs. Other posts are sharing some fine examples of this. I'll offer one that doesn't get talked about much: Go Daddy's use of a CEO blog accompanying its Super Bowl ads.
But for every clueful effort there's plenty of other companies who see blogs as a way to deliver the same old sales and marketing message, only via a blog. It doesn't work, and is painful to read. Those companies will claim blogs are a fad, and blame the format. Doh!
Liebert and Sanmina have been selling blade server cabinets that use chilled water for at least three years. Vendors and data center operators have been wrestling with the heat loads generated by blade servers since 2001, and the dilemma of how to cool high-density "hot spots" has caused many tech companies to wait on buying blades to replace their larger servers. That's changing now, driven by the need to save costs with more efficient use of data center space.
The industry has taken a two-pronged approach. Equipment vendors have been developing cabinets with built-in cooling, while design consultants try to reconfigure raised-floor data center space to circulate air more efficiently. The problem usually isn't cooling the air, but directing the cooled air through the cabinet properly.
There was an excellent discussion of this problem last year at Data Center World in Las Vegas. As enterprises finally start to consolidate servers and adopt blade serves (which were overhyped for years), many are finding their data centers simply aren't designed to handle the "hot spots" created by cabinets chock full of blades. Facilities with lower ceilings are particularly difficult to reconfigure. The additional cooling demand usually means higher raised floors, which leaves less space to properly recirculate the air above the cabinets. Some data center engineers refer to this as "irreversibility" - data center design problems that can't be corrected in the physical space available. This was less of an issue a few years back, when there was tons of decent quality data center space available for a song from bankrupt telcos and colo companies. But companies who built their own data centers just before blades became the rage are finding this a problem.
Google seems likely to make its Urchin-based tools available for free to its AdSense publishers and AdWords clients. Google's interest is in making ads more relevant, which in turn allows to to charge more for ads. That won't be happy news for search engine optimization (SEO) specialists who help site owners improve their visibility. If Google is offering user-friendly traffic analysis tools, are site owners likely to pay SEO firms? Some will, but this will make do-it-yourself search optimization much easier.
IT Conversations, produced by Doug Kaye, has tons of worthwhile interviews on IT, blogging and geek-centric issues. Lots of the audio is from industry conferences.
The posters talking about a repeat of the.com bubble are simply not paying attention.
The business press and venture capitalists are interested because working business models are finally emerging for a small number of worthwhile blogs. Sony is paying $25,000 a month to sponsor Lifehacker, the latest Gawker blog. Meanwhile, Google is touting Weblogs Inc. as the poster child for AdSense revenue at a presentation for stock analysts. This is real revenue. Yes, many blogs are flooding the Internet with crapola. But some of the better blogs are providing useful news and information and building niche audiences that advertisers will pay to reach.
Slashdot Mirror
Larien is correct. The changes indicate infrastructure shifts at domain registrars, specifically Network Solutions and Namezero (as alluded to in this Netcraft post from 2003 and this one from 2001. Both briefly shifted from Solaris to Windows, and then back again.
A big question is whether major MMOGs evolve along a two-track path, with commercial and con-commercial servers for each world. The Terra Nova blog has had numerous discussions of this topic.
Auction sites like IGE offer affiliate programs, allowing gaming web sites to make cash by referring potential buyers. This may become the business model for Eye on MOGs and similar sites. Several sites have offered Everquest info for some time, including EQEcon and EQ Prices, although I gather they're less critical since Sony opened its new "official" auctions at Station Exchange.
This is significant, since you have a lot more phishing attacks targeting Paypal and eBay than the major banks these days.
About a year ago the .info central registry, Afilias, began offering the domains free to registrars - who could then charge for them or give them away. A unit of eNom registered more than a million .info names "on behalf of" their existing .com and .net customers. Soon after Dotster followed suit with about 350,000 more. The one-year free registration period on these .info names is now expiring, and a bunch are being deleted as a result.
Many will fail. There was already a casualty this week, as Webby Media shut down just nine days after launching. Their business plan: give away 100% of ad revenue to bloggers. Doh!
There are now blogs emerging that do nothing but cover these blog networks, like the newly-launched Blog Network Watch or Blogebrity.
Domains are a business asset. You need to take the time to understand them - which the initial submitter clearly has not. If a domain name you want has already been registered, be prepared to spend a lot of time and/or money to acquire it, either through the UDRP appeal process or "drop catching" (buying an expiring domain name as it is deleted from the registrar's system) which nowadays is really a game for professionals.
The NY Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and San Jose Mercury News all announced staff layoffs last week. Where do you think those folks are going? To the Web, to eat their former employers' collective lunches. Lots of these folks have real expertise, and are bringing their contacts and rolodexes with them.
I speak from experience. I took the plunge in 2000. I was the computer-assisted reporting director at a daily newspaper that was clueless about the future of the web, and unwilling to invest in the basics (e-mail for repoters ... doh!). So I left to write for technology sites, and have been doing it ever since.
Look at Six Apart's next-generation blogging tool, Project Comet. It emphasizes not only sharing, but also ways to limit access to a small group.
In the US there appear to be a bunch of trademark applications either related to Linux or using the phrase. The only one for "Linux" (stand-alone) appears to be a 1999 application for laundry detergent from a Swiss company. I'm not a lawyer or patent expert, but I gather other Slashdot readers may know more on the status/history of "Linux" trademarks here in the US, where the patent office often seems to approve applications without particularly thorough investigation or prior usage.
When an affiliate-driven industry begins to experience slower growth, it usually responds by spending more money on marketing to acquire new customers ... which might in turn boost the affiliate payouts for the eleventy million poker blogs running Party Poker ads. It's not a slump, it's just a redistribution of wealth from shareholders to bloggers!
And yes, the poker comment spam is out of control. It's all driven by botnets. My blogs periodically get hit by these crapfloods, and you see the exact same comment or trackback sent to 25 posts from 20 different IP addresses in a couple minutes. Not hard to figure out ... just a pain to defend and clean up.
But they're adapting. I was at the Borgata in Atlantic City last week, where they have tables for "Texas Hold 'Em BONUS," in which the casino has altered the betting rules to favor the house. There are other players, but you all play against the dealer, and have a $5 ante and $5 minimum bet on each round (flop, turn, river) to continue. It essentially takes Hold Em and structures it like a black jack game, complete with the house advantage. I guess it's the casinos' strategy to capitalize on the popularity of Hold 'Em while taking the skill out of the game.
The new version 6.0 of the Zone Alarm Pro firewall also includes an anti-spyware capacity, which runs automatic scans at set intervals. The default setting is to automatically delete tracking cookies. That's bound to mean more cookie deletions, as Zone Alarm is widely used.
Phishers Steal Trust From Ebay Sign In Pages
"Fraudsters have exploited a flaw in the eBay web site that allows them to orchestrate phishing attacks using eBay's own Sign In page. ... By including special parameters at the end of the URL, the fraudster has changed the behaviour of the Sign In page so that when a user successfully logs in, they will then be sent to the fraudster's phishing site via an open redirect hosted on servlet.ebay.com."
Because of the "borrowing" of ebay's web site, the EBay toolbar reports the phishing site as legit.
IBM today unveiled a chilled water cooling system to manage heat loads for high-density cabinets using its eServer cluster products. It's been dubbed "Cool Blue." The debate about water cooling in the data center is a heated one (for a conversation about cooling) and has been discussed here before. Amid all the other strategies mentioned here, it's interesting to see Big Blue touting water cooling.
Like email spam, these sites will continue to exist so long as people click on the links, thus supporting the business model.
A key question is how the ruling guides Hollywood's legal strategy in trying to halt piracy via P2P Networks. The ruling seems to make it easier for RIAA/MPAA to tie up developers of P2P software in lengthy court battles, which now have to be fought on the specifics of how a product is marketed and used, rather than the liability for piracy resting with the end-user infringer. It looks like the Supreme Court has handed Hollywood a club, and they've shown their willingness to use it.
Most families with serious gamers will have seriously pimped-out PCs with multiple consoles as well. That will be true in the next generation of consoles as well.
With domain pros making big profits on domain name resales and venture capitalists planning large investments in domain names, expect rampant speculation in .xxx domains once sales begin.
I read a lot of "corporate" blogs, and I think it's pretty easy to spot the ones that understand blogging, those that are chasing the bandwagon. Blogs are a really effective tool for sharing business expertise in a way that builds relationships with potential customers and partners. They work well because they're different from the tired old approaches to sales/marketing communications. The key is to talk about your industry using an authentic voice rather than marketing-speak. Some enlightened companies are figuring that out and making effective use of blogs. Other posts are sharing some fine examples of this. I'll offer one that doesn't get talked about much: Go Daddy's use of a CEO blog accompanying its Super Bowl ads. But for every clueful effort there's plenty of other companies who see blogs as a way to deliver the same old sales and marketing message, only via a blog. It doesn't work, and is painful to read. Those companies will claim blogs are a fad, and blame the format. Doh!
The industry has taken a two-pronged approach. Equipment vendors have been developing cabinets with built-in cooling, while design consultants try to reconfigure raised-floor data center space to circulate air more efficiently. The problem usually isn't cooling the air, but directing the cooled air through the cabinet properly.
There was an excellent discussion of this problem last year at Data Center World in Las Vegas. As enterprises finally start to consolidate servers and adopt blade serves (which were overhyped for years), many are finding their data centers simply aren't designed to handle the "hot spots" created by cabinets chock full of blades. Facilities with lower ceilings are particularly difficult to reconfigure. The additional cooling demand usually means higher raised floors, which leaves less space to properly recirculate the air above the cabinets. Some data center engineers refer to this as "irreversibility" - data center design problems that can't be corrected in the physical space available. This was less of an issue a few years back, when there was tons of decent quality data center space available for a song from bankrupt telcos and colo companies. But companies who built their own data centers just before blades became the rage are finding this a problem.
Google seems likely to make its Urchin-based tools available for free to its AdSense publishers and AdWords clients. Google's interest is in making ads more relevant, which in turn allows to to charge more for ads. That won't be happy news for search engine optimization (SEO) specialists who help site owners improve their visibility. If Google is offering user-friendly traffic analysis tools, are site owners likely to pay SEO firms? Some will, but this will make do-it-yourself search optimization much easier.
IT Conversations, produced by Doug Kaye, has tons of worthwhile interviews on IT, blogging and geek-centric issues. Lots of the audio is from industry conferences.
The posters talking about a repeat of the .com bubble are simply not paying attention.
The business press and venture capitalists are interested because working business models are finally emerging for a small number of worthwhile blogs. Sony is paying $25,000 a month to sponsor Lifehacker, the latest Gawker blog. Meanwhile, Google is touting Weblogs Inc. as the poster child for AdSense revenue at a presentation for stock analysts. This is real revenue. Yes, many blogs are flooding the Internet with crapola. But some of the better blogs are providing useful news and information and building niche audiences that advertisers will pay to reach.