The Miami Dolphins football team has filed a UDRP for the domain name Dolphins.com, which is parked and currently shows NFL football-related PPC advertisements, including an image of a football stadium. In addition to advertisements for “Miami Dolphins Tickets,” there are also ads for figurines and “Swimming with Dolphins Retreats.”

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing (2006 Annual Report) filed by Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX), the publicly traded company owns Dolphins.com (as of 2006). Further, in the same filing, Marchex listed MDNH, Inc. as a subsidiary, and Dolphins.com is currently registered to dnsadmin@mdnhinc.com. MDNHINC.com is registered to MDNH, Inc.

This is a high value domain name, both because of its generic nature (animal domain names are always in demand) and because of the NFL team with the same name. This is going to be an interesting case to watch with these two heavyweights going at it, especially because of the potential impact of losing the domain name could be on Marchex’s bottom line. IMO, this is easily a six figure domain name.

A few people have asked today – and the answer is yes, my blog has a new header. I didn’t think the old header was utilizing its space as well as possible, and the new header allowed me to easily add two new sections – a Domain Names for Sale section and an Expiring Domain Names section, which are both self-explanatory.

I haven’t decided whether I am going to accept outside submissions for the sale section yet. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like brokering domain names for others and only do so on rare occasions. If the demand is there, I may begin accepting domain name listings.

My designer was able to make a couple of enhancements to the structure of the blog as well, which will help with search engine optimization (I hope). Literally a half hour after he made a couple of changes to the site structure, I received a Google Alert with about 10 posts that had just been indexed from months ago. I don’t know if it was coincidental or if the change had anything to do with the indexing, but either way, it is going to help in the long-run.

As always, if you have any suggestions, please drop me a note and I will see what I can do.

With domain theft in the news again, it’s time to take a quick look at some security offerings of popular domain name registrars. The security measures below may not be the only security features offered by registrars, so if I missed something, please let me know:

Name.com – NameSafe VIP service offering a security USB key fobs for accounts. Domain owners who have the keyfob need to use it in order to log in to their account, preventing anyone without the security key from accessing account-level actions (such as a domain transfer). Name.com is the first ICANN accredited registrar to offer this type of security service. Cost: $19.95 per account per year.

Moniker – MaxLock is an added layer of protection customers can purchase to safeguard their domain names at Moniker. With MaxLock, the customer provides Moniker with a government-issued form of identification (passport, license, military ID…etc) and two security questions, which cannot be retrieved online. Any account or domain changes must be completed through the Moniker security team. Cost: $19.95 per domain name per year or $124.99 per portfolio per year.

Fabulous – Challenge/Response security and the Fabulous Security Key are both security offerings of Fabulous. Challenge/Response is a security feature that allows the account owner to supply answers to a preset list of questions, in order to verify the identity of the user before being granted account access. The security key is a USB device that provides additional levels of security to sensitive areas of a domain owner’s account.