Due to technical difficulties, Rick Latona made a difficult decision this evening and has opted to move the TRAFFIC auction to Saturday morning. Throughout the early part of the auction, the Internet functionality was spotty, and online bidding was impacted. At one point, the Latonas.com team sent out an email blast with phone numbers to call in order to bid remotely.

As Rick mentioned when he halted the auction abruptly, he has an obligation to his sellers to get the best possible prices, and with Internet bidding out of order, the best chance of success for the auction would be on a different platform tomorrow morning. I am sure there will be more details to follow, and I will update this post once I have more information.

According to the auctioneers, the closed sales will be honored at their prices and the auction will resume where it left off. You can stay apprised of the situation here, and I will have more details as soon as they are received.

UPDATE:

The auction will be held at 10:00 am Pacific on Saturday morning. That’s 1:00 pm on the East Coast or 19:00 central European time. The auction will be held on Proxibid.

Back in November, I wrote about PITCHFest and LAUNCHFest, two new sessions that were scheduled for the Domain Fest conference happening next week in LA. I just received word that there will be two PITCHFest sessions in lieu of LAUNCHFest, and I think this is a smart idea.

PITCHFest was billed as an opportunity to present a five minute summary of a business idea that will “enhance the value of parked or developed domain names by driving increased traffic and/or revenue.” LAUNCHFest was billed as an opportunity for applicants to choose from a small group of Portfolio Brains (an Oversee.net company) domain names and the applicants would present a business plan to judges describing how they will build a business on that domain name.

I was critical of LAUNCHFest, as I felt it would benefit Oversee.net much more so than the applicants. I felt that the domain names that were being offered up for applicants to develop were overvalued by the company, and there really wasn’t anything rewarding about the deal for the applicant who wins.

The format for PITCHFEST will be as follows (adapted from an email I just received):

Four finalists will present in the first PITCHfest session on Tuesday, and another four on Thursday.  The finalists will be given five minutes each to present their product/service concepts.

Immediately after each five minute presentation, judges will be prompted for their opinion on the merits of the product/service presented.  A total of ten minutes will be allocated to the comments from all judges combined after each presentation—times are intentionally kept tight to maintain a candid, hard-hitting session.

Judges will rate each concept, assigning a score of up to 25 points in each of the following dimensions:

• Creativity
• Viability
• Originality
• Revenue potential

They will announce a winner at the end of each round.  After the second round, the audience can vote for the “People’s Choice” winner from both rounds.  Winners get a nice trophy, but more importantly highly visible jump start toward success for their new product/service.  And the audience will learn about new ways to improve their revenue.

Judges for the first contest include Frank Schilling (Name Administration, Inc.), Adam Rioux (Octane360), Eric Liaw (Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), and Ron Sheridan.

The judges who were originally scheduled to participate in judging the LAUNCHfest will now judge the second PITCHfest. They include David Liu (Jefferies and Company, Inc.) Douglas McPherson (IdeaLab), Richard Morganstern (Tech Coast Angels), and Ron Sheridan.

Starting backwards, you’d be stupid to put your name on a company and in a global press release if you didn’t believe in the concept.  When we took out an IDNTools ad on the iconic Reuters billboard in Times Square it was a sign of our confidence in what is to come.  Similarly, when we issued an international press release (link here) briefly explaining why IDNs will be the next big opportunity, we did so proudly with facts to back up our assertions.

So what are the facts?  IDNs are any Internationalized Domain Names that require the use of foreign characters, such as 溧阳.com.  The billion plus population in China actually prefers to speak Chinese, type Chinese and read Chinese. Now that they can register Chinese domain names, aka IDNs, they have been taking advantage of the opportunity and will continue to do so.  The same is true for Japan, Russia, and many other countries.  Unfortunately, IDNs became available after the domain rush was well underway, and as such many domainers and businesses still don’t realize that IDN.com’s can be registered.

But why would you want to register a URL that starts in one language and ends in English (i.e. 溧阳.com)?  This is certainly not fluid to jump from one language to another.  The retort is twofold.  First, Chuck Gomes of Verisign announced that IDN.com will essentially be “aliased” to  IDN.IDN.  This means that the owner of (Chinese).com will also be the owner of (Chinese).(com-in-Chinese).  There is much value in having an IDN on both sides of the dot.

Even in the interim, before aliasing, IDN.com domains are precious.  After all, .com is a worldwide brand and it is easy for natives to switch between a native language (for the IDN domain) and English (for the .com extension).  In addition, the search volume for an IDN, as measured by the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, is many multiples of the traffic can be bought for a similarly priced ASCII (aka English .com) domain.  For instance, shorts.com in IDN can likely be bought for the price of (insert adjective)shorts.com in ASCII (English .com), and the IDN would be a wiser purchase in terms of having higher search volume and less competition.

If you wonder, why others aren’t buying yet?  They are.  The volume of public weekly sales on IDNForums continues to increase exponentially, and if you keep a close watch on the whois, you’ll see many top tier terms have changed ownership over the last few months, indicating stealth acquisitions. Interest in dropping domains is also taking off as highlighted by the steep increase in subscribers to our IDNDroplist.

No doubt this is a complex niche, and a new reader must have many questions.  So ask them.  Ask them in the comments, email us or Elliot, and we’ll address them in the next post.

Next post: IDN Q&A

Aaron Krawitz of IDNBlog and Gary Males of IDNDemystified, are guest authors of this IDN series on ElliotsBlog.  Aaron and Gary co-own  IDNDroplist, IDNTools and IDNNewsletter.

While doing some testing on one of my websites that uses WordPress, I registered as a subscriber.  Later on, while still logged in as the subscriber, I typed in the URL that I would have used as the admin, forgetting that I wasn’t logged in as the admin. Surprisingly, I was still taken to the back-end dashboard of the website, although I didn’t have the same level of access or ability to make changes.

Although there isn’t much (if anything) that can be done in the Dashboard as a subscriber, there is still a treasure trove of information that can be found. A subscriber can see the publisher’s post count, comment count, spam count, recent incoming links, and possibly most importantly, the WordPress version that is running on the website.

The reason it’s important to shield others from seeing the WordPress version you are running is because many WP updates have security components due to known exploits. If someone is behind on their upgrade, a hacker may be able to do something malicious with one of the known exploits. There are other ways to find out what version of WP someone is running (footer or source code), but many people prevent the display of this info by using a special plugin or coding to have it removed.

There is a way to prevent access to your dashboard, and it’s something I implemented already (see screenshot above). Under Settings in the Dashboard, there is a link for General settings. On this page, make sure the “Anyone can Register” check box is not checked and people won’t be able to register. If you do allow people to register, make sure the default is Subscriber so they don’t have other privileges.

Even if you don’t have a link displayed for people to register, they can use the standard registration url used by all WordPress blogs and websites (just substituting your domain name). It’s not terrible if someone gains access to your Dashboard, but I don’t think it’s helpful either.