From the New York Times this past July:

Newburyport and Plum Island, at the mouth of the Merrimack River, combine shops, boutiques and maritime heritage with breathtaking views and beaches. The sea captains of 200 years ago are gone, but in town, the charm of their stately homes and commercial buildings remains.

Newburyport is a great tourist town in Massachusetts that is filled every spring and summer with vacationers. People come to walk along the water, enjoy boating activities, visit the art galleries and antique shops, and eat in the cute cafes and restaurants. There are beautiful homes and the town has a quaint New England feel feel.

My company just acquired Newburyport.com and plan to develop it in the coming weeks.

Incidentally, #3 on the NYT list of Northeast getaways is Lowell, Massachusetts.

In addition to a variety of domain news sources, there are a number of domain tools that I use daily when buying and selling domain names, and I wanted to share some of them with you.  If you use other tools, I would be interested to know what you use, and what they do for you. Below are my favorites – although this list will probably grow as I think of other tools I use:

Whois Lookup (Whois.sc) – I think everyone has a favorite Whois look-up, and I use Whois.sc/domain.com in order to see who owns what.  On my Blackberry, I prefer iWhois.com because it loads faster for me.

Domain History Tool (Domain Tools) – This is imperative when buying an older domain name in order to make sure everything looks legit. The last thing you want to do is buy a stolen domain name, so this tool can help you see if something looks fishy.

Website History Check (Archive.org) – This allows you to see various websites that previously existed on a domain name.

Keyword Popularity (Google Adwords) – See how many searches are done monthly and on average via Google to see how people are searching and the exact terms they use.  This tool is also great for development to see what long tail keywords people are looking to find.

Domain Sales Data (DNSalePrice.com) – Although recorded domain sales don’t always mean that similar domain names will sell for the same prices, it’s a good sanity check.  DNJournal’s sales data is also great, but this tool has many more sales, as DNJ records the biggest sales.

Bulk Domain Search (Moniker) – Easy to use and register – and I don’t have to go through 10 pages of upsell junk that I don’t need.

Escrow (Escrow.com) – If I am 100% certain about the domain name’s provenance and not concerned about the seller, I like to use Escrow.com.  It’s simple to set up, I don’t have to wait to sign forms and fax paperwork, they’re very quick, and they clearly know a thing or two about great domain names. Escrow.com is also trusted by non-domainers, making transactions even easier.

Reverse IP (Domain Tools) I secretly love using this tool when buying domain names.  Frequently, people have multiple domain names on one IP address, and if I can see several great domain names owned by one company, I can make a larger bulk offer.

What other tools am I missing?

Is anyone planning to attend SES New York this week at the Hilton in Manhattan?  The show is billed as a search engine marketing and optimization event. I am planning to hit the exhibition floor tomorrow and/or Wednesday, so please drop me a line if you are attending the conference and would like to get together. This should be a great show, since almost all of the best search-related companies will be attending.

At the moment, I am specifically looking for search help with Lowell.com and Burbank.com, but it would also be great to learn more about SEO for future projects.

If you know someone exhibiting that I should meet, please let me know.