Apparently Francois Carrillo of Domaining.com decided to add tech blog feeds to his website today. The result of the decision was that Domaining.com was briefly filled with non-domain related news articles. This made it difficult for domain investors to quickly find their favorite domain news and blog articles, and people publicly complained in blogs, Facebook, forums, and Twitter. That is, until Francois reversed course and took those feeds out.

I know Domaining.com has become popular because it allows people to easily find interesting domain-related news articles without having to visit a whole host of websites. I even get about 8-12% of my daily traffic from Domaining.com, so any confusion or excess articles might result in less traffic to my site. However, Francois has every right to make his own business decisions without public criticism from users who aren’t paying him a dime.

I don’t know if his business model is good (because someone may eventually buy him out) or it sucks (because it’s now a loss leader), but that’s not my business or anyone’s business.

The fact that we use and benefit from Francois’ website should not mean that we have the right to publicly criticize the guy and put him on blast when he tests things out in an effort to make some money. If you are paying for services and they aren’t what you agreed to when you signed up, you have every right to complain. When you are using someone else’s services at no cost to you, you have no right to complain.

I support the First Amendment right to free speech, but I think it’s uncalled for when people openly criticize the guy for trying to make a buck with his business. There are plenty of people who do worse things to make a buck.

K-Swiss is an American shoe company especially known for its sneakers. The company is based out of California and was founded in 1966 by two Swiss brothers who became interested in tennis after moving to the US, where they first produced leather tennis shoes.

Times have changed, and the innovative company has several lines of shoes and athletic wear as well. I was researching some domain names the other day, and I noticed the company is quite smart in terms of their domain acquisitions.  A quick look at the reverse IP of the primary K-Swiss domain name reveals that they own the following generic domain names:

• SneakersDirect.com
• TennisApparel.com
• TennisClothes.com
• TenniShoes.com
• TennisShoes.com
• TrainingShoes.com

To take this a step further, if you visit any of the above domain names, they all forward to the company’s primary KSwiss.com website. That said, you can see that K-Swiss isn’t making a SEO play by owning important keyword domain names. Right now, they are taking advantage of the highly targeted type in traffic that comes to these domain names (heck, even the typo in the group).

I wonder what domain values would be like these days if most big companies had the same understanding about domain names and direct navigation traffic.