Several weeks ago, on the eve of the strike by the Writer’s Guild of America, I mentioned that the writers strike could be a boon for websites as people tune in online rather than watch reruns and countless reality shows. Now that the strike has been in place for weeks, there are some signs that writers may opt to move to the online distribution channel instead of waiting idly for the contract issue to be resolved.

According to a recent article in The Guardian about Hollywood writers moving online, “Seven groups are thought to be working on forming companies to challenge the dominance of the studios.” It appears that some writers are choosing to bypass the studios and create direct to consumer content via the Internet. Just as direct marketing does, this content can be highly targeted to a specific niche. Writers will have the creative freedom to express themselves, and they will be able to produce material of their choice, without the normal studio oversight.

I don’t have the time to do this, but I think it would be neat if someone set up a website specifically for the striking writers to distribute their work. YouTube and other video sharing sites are great, but it would be neat to have a specific website devoted to the striking writers, to give them the opportunity to display their skills and allow visitors to compensate them.

According to an article in CNN, the gaming industry is capitalizing on the writers strike, and I don’t see a reason why Internet television couldn’t see the same gains.

As the year winds down, and the final hours of 2007 are upon us, there aren’t many things that can be done that will be impactful on 2008. One fairly small (buy often overlooked) thing that can still be done is purchasing your office supplies for the new year.

I don’t know about you, but most of my trips to Staples ended in small purchases of random things for the business. I needed printers, pens, folders, binders, ink…etc. Lots of various office supplies were needed throughout the year. Well, this year I am going to do things a bit differently. I have a list of the office supplies I used throughout the year as well as a list of supplies I currently have “in stock.” I am going to Staples this afternoon and will buy everything I can possibly use for next year that I can fit into my apartment. While this isn’t going to be thousands of dollars worth of supplies by any stretch, it will be save me a few dollars come tax time.

There have been a couple of accounting programs I wanted to try out in lieu of my Excel workbook accounting, and this is the perfect time to buy them!

Wired magazine discusses tech trends for 2008, and they are running an editor and user-submitted vote on predictions for the new year. One vote of interest to people in the domain investment community is the poll question related to the .mobi extension:

“Get ready for a new internet extention (sic): .mobi for mobile devices and cell phones“ 

Will corporate America and independent web developers make 2008 a boom year for .mobi, or will issues like the voided .mobi auction lead investors to publicly air their grievances about the situation?

On Thursday, I discussed the business ramifications of backing out of a domain deal, and how doing so can potentially cause major damage to a person’s reputation. Both publicly and privately, I’ve heard from a few people about this type of issue, and it really seems to be a big problem in the industry. For whatever reason, some people believe that just because an official contract created by attorney was not signed by both parties, the agreement is not legally binding.

Yesterday, my friend Mike Berkens discussed the legal aspect of a buyer reneging on a deal. There are many variables that come into play with a situation like this, so it isn’t always cut and dry.

While most domain transactions probably wouldn’t be worth the expense and hassle of filing a lawsuit if an agreement was breeched, it might merit a call to an attorney to explore the options. In all cases, the buyer should take some time to decide whether its really worth fighting, as legal action isn’t usual a simple process. A business case/cost benefit analysis should be made to determine whether the outcome would benefit the business based on the potential costs.

Whatever the case may be, I think everyone can agree that backing out of an agreement is in poor form.

Compliments to the folks who run the city of Indianapolis official website. They recently changed their domain name from IndyGov.org to Indy.gov. According to their press release:

“The Mayor’s administration and ISA have been working for more than a year to obtain permission from the federal government to use the new, shorter domain name which will make the site easier to promote and make local services more accessible to Indianapolis residents.“

Indy.gov is easier for visitors to remember, and there is no confusion as to whether the city runs the site or not, as .gov domain names are only run by governmental entities. Smart thinking! I would have recommended trying to obtain Indianapolis.gov as well, but maybe that can be done later.

One free piece of advice I would like to offer (even as a Patriots fan!) is to make sure the original IndyGov.org domain name doesn’t expire!! Keep this domain name and forward it to the new website to ensure visitors to the old domain name do not get lost. This domain name should be kept forever, as people may have linked to it, bookmarked it, and city promotional materials may have this old domain name listed.

There have been many cases where organizations neglect to renew an old domain name, and it can cause major problems!

Now is the time to make sure your record books are in order to help save you time during tax season. Take some time to organize your records, to make sure you have all of your sales, purchases, expenses, and donations are recorded and in order. Oftentimes people pull their hair out in the days and weeks preceding April 15th, trying to remember specific transactions. This can be avoided by going over your books now and putting everything in order.

It could also be helpful if you set up your record books for 2008 so you can start off the new year on the right foot. You probably don’t need any special software to keep your records straight. A simple Excel workbook can help you stay organized. If you are organized, it will pay dividends during the next tax year, as you and/or your accountant will be able to make a guesstimate on your taxable income throughout the year, which can help you make intelligent decisions to offset your taxable income instead of the typical rushed decisions at the end of the year (like now).

It’s getting down to the wire, but SEO guru Aaron Wall provided some good year end tax tips to help save some money at tax time.

Want to know one of the quickest ways to destroy your reputation? Back out of a domain deal, and you can be sure that people will think twice before doing business with you ever again. This is a small industry and word gets around very quickly. People want to do business with trustworthy people, and if you violate this trust, people won’t want to do business with you. Whether you deal with premium generics, trademarks, typos…etc - it doesn’t matter - nobody wants to do business with someone that is dishonest.

In the past few weeks on various domain forums, I have seen a number of cases where people backed out of deals after an email agreement was made. A couple even started escrow transactions but backed out because a better offer was received in the meantime. I think this is VERY shortsighted. Perhaps the seller made a few hundred dollars more on a particular transaction, but it is doubtful many people will ever do business with that person again. I had this experience once, and I won’t do business with the seller again.

As I said before, “honesty and trust is the most important thing” in the domain investment business. If an acquaintance or friend tells me about someone who backed out of a deal, I wouldn’t do business with that person. It’s not worth taking a chance that something will happen in between agreeing to terms and the domain name being transfered.

The one caveat to this is in the event a trademark claim is made on the domain name. One unwritten rule of the business is that you never sell a domain name while any potential legal issue is pending. In that case, and only in that case, is it permissible to back out of a deal - and only after explaining the situation.

Whether a contract is legally valid if its made via email doesn’t really matter for the purpose of this post. I am strictly speaking from an ethical point of view. If you happen to be someone that is contemplating backing out of a deal (or maybe recently backed out of a deal), I would strongly suggest you reconsider. This is a mistake that is made only once in this business. Usually the first time is the last and only time.

I found a link to David Airey’s blog on a forum and I think it’s important to read this. Had his registrar enabled a security key fob system, this theft could have been prevented. It’s scary to know that email accounts can be hacked, but its even scarier to know that if it happens, all of your domain names could be vulnerable.

Consumers can purchase insurance policies in the event valuables are stolen, but due to the nature of domain names, I don’t think coverage for theft events exist. Sure, a domain investor can fight to get his names back using the court system, but that is costly and takes a great deal of time. Valuable SEO rankings can be lost in the time a website is down, costing a business thousands of dollars in losses.

I think its about time a registrar makes domain name security impenetrable from outside theft.  As far as I am concerned, the best way to do it is using a security key fob. When will a registrar take action and make domain theft a thing of the past?

I don’t usually spend much time pining over recent sales, but I think there were two great buys listed in the DNJournal.com sales report this past week, both of which took place on GreatDomains. I think Our.com selling for $60,000 was a great price. I know what I said about 3 letter .com names, but this is a great 3 letter, one word name. As I said, there are some names that are worth every penny, and this is one of them.

In my opinion, the biggest steal was FatTuesday.com, which sold for just $16,500. This is the perfect domain name for a website about New Orleans and Mardi Gras. There is also a famous bar with locations throughout the east coast called Fat Tuesday, and they own the domain name Fat-Tuesday.com. They serve some pretty good mixed drinks like the “190 Octane” and “Hurricane.” I’ve been to a few Fat Tuesday bars, and its always Mardi Gras when you’re there! The buyer got a great deal on this one.

Lately, have you checked to make sure all of your parked domain names are optimized for the proper keywords and images? While the year is winding down and things are slowing down, now might be a great time to make sure that all of your domain names are resolving the way you want them to resolve, and that the PPC links (if applicable) are targeted to your domain name. A domain name receiving targeted traffic is great, but converting that traffic is what’s important, and you can’t convert the traffic unless you are displaying relevant advertising links.

I spent a bit of time doing this yesterday, and I was surprised at the results. In March, I registered the domain name MountedHeads.com after watching a show related to hunting. Don’t ask me why I was watching it because I have no idea. Nevertheless, this name receives minimal traffic, but it has made much more than the registration fee over the past 9 months. Because of that, I figured it was already optimized.

Well, it wasn’t exactly optimized. When I tested it, there were a couple of relevant links, but four of the six were somewhat unrelated. I researched the stats from the past 8 months, and almost all of the clicks were related to hunting and mounting animal heads (taxidermy). I changed the keyword term to “mounted animal heads,” and now the links are almost all targeted. I also changed the images, as only one of the three were related to hunting.

My recommendation is for you to spend a couple of hours over each of the next few days looking through your names that receive traffic to test the keyword optimization. Even if they are making money, you might be leaving some money on the table by not fully optimizing your domain names. Intuitive programs that automatically optimize your names can be good and save time, but sometimes the human touch is needed, too.