Sean Stafford is at it again. Every few months, it seems that Sean is building something helpful to domainers, and I think his new service, ComWired.com can help domainers and domain developers.

The DNS service is billed as a way to split up a domain name’s traffic depending on where the traffic originates.  For example, if you have a parked domain name that receives traffic from the US, Mexico, Japan, China and Russia, you can choose where to send traffic from each country, depending on where you find that it can be monetized better.  This is a neat concept for domain investors, but it can similarly work for domain developers, too.

Portland.com is the online guide to Portland, Oregon. Being from New Hampshire, when I hear Portland.com, I immediately think of Portland, Maine. Knowing the brains behind Portland.com, I am sure they analyzed their traffic to know that its looking for information about Portland, Oregon rather than Maine, however, I am sure there is some traffic looking for information about Portland, Maine.

With help from ComWired.com, the owners can detect where the traffic is coming from, and if it’s coming from New England cities, hypothetically, they can send it to Portland.com/Maine, which would theoretically have a site all about the city in Maine. All other traffic can be sent to the main (ha ha) site where they would find information about Portland, Oregon. This could also be effective for country based geodomains.

I should add ComWired.com can only split up traffic by country at the moment, but they expect to be able to split it by city in a few short weeks.  For now, the service is free to use, although that will probably change in the future.

I got together with some of my former colleagues a couple nights ago at a memorial party for a colleague who died suddenly last week. We were discussing the progress of my former group, and we started discussing the Internet strategy they have and where it’s headed.

They are in the process of launching a new stand alone product website (their first stand alone site), although they were only able to acquire domain names that are variations of the product’s name (for example MyProduct.com, ProductOnline.com, MyProductOnline.com…etc). I asked why they didn’t go out and buy the straight up Product name from its current owner, and they didn’t really have an answer other than the fact that it’s owned by someone else.

This got my mind turning.  Here is a group at a huge company that has seen tremendous growth, are about to launch a serious Internet campaign/website, yet they don’t really understand the value of domain names and what it would mean to own the Product.com domain name.  I assume many companies are in a similar position, and educating them is difficult.

I would imagine a numbers argument would be the way to educate them, showing that the Product.com domain gets a % of traffic (intended visitors) which could be lost if they don’t search to find the correct website.  Figuring out the lost business as a result of not owning the domain name should be the amount of money they could/would pay to acquire it.  However, once the site is launched, it’s unlikely that the owner would sell it, especially if he is fearful of a litigious response.

How do you educate people about the value of domain names?