As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, Sedo has teamed up with the .CO Registry and together they will be auctioning off the premium, one letter domain name e.CO, with the proceeds from this auction going to the charity of the winning bidder’s choice. The final live auction for this domain name will be held on June 10th at 4pm in New York City, at the conclusion of Internet Week.

To help celebrate the auction and encourage bidding, the .CO registry will be hosting a fun event, “COcktails & e.CO! LIVE Auction Finale” at the Soho Grand Hotel, Harbor Room in New York City (310 West Broadway) at 2pm on Thursday, June 10th. Of course, you can also bid for e.CO online.

If you live in the area and would like to attend, please register for the event online (you MUST register before). It’s free to attend, and I am sure there will be plenty of domain investors and other Internet entrepreneurs in the crowd. Have a drink, meet other people in the space, and introduce yourself to the representatives of the .CO Registry to ask any questions.

I am not someone who is interested in politics or discussing politics. In fact, I strongly dislike political conversations with polarizing topics – it’s just not my thing. That being said, I came across President Obama’s Twitter page this afternoon and saw something that I think is pretty ironic.

Just about all of the URLs that are linked to from the President’s page use Bitly to shorten the URL. Although Bitly owns Bitly.com, it primarily uses Bit.LY for its shortened URLs, and .LY is the ccTLD for the country of Libya. For instance, http://bit.ly/bROnKn, http://www.bit.ly/9-l, and http://bit.ly/a-r were all recently used on President Obama’s Twitter page.

As you are may be aware, the country of Libya, along with Cuba and Syria was described by John Bolton as “Beyond the Axis of Evil.”  The government of Libya isn’t exactly on the friendliest of terms with the US government, so it’s somewhat humorous in an ironic way that the President’s Twitter staff would choose to use Bitly to shorten URLs.

From what I understand, it’s fairly simple to create a URL shortener on any domain name. There are plenty of short .US domain names that would make the perfect URL shortener for our President. Just some food for thought.

I won’t call this a “scam” email because I don’t think it meets the definition of scam, but I’ve received a number of similar emails and wanted to share it with you. Clearly, it looks like the objective is to get me to register a bunch of ccTLD domain names I probably would not have wanted, under the guise of brand protection.

The initial email stated:

Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on November 2, 2009, One company which self-styled “NOA INDUSTRIAL LTD” are applying to register “burbank” as brand name and domain names as below:
burbank.asia
burbank.com.hk
burbank.com.tw
burbank.hk
burbank.net.cn
burbank.org.cn
burbank.tw
After our initial checking, we found the brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company’s, so we need to get the confirmation from your company. If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please DO NOT reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have no any relationship with this company, please contact us within 10 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application  submitted by “NOA INDUSTRIAL LTD” unconditionally.

Best Regards,
Alan jin

After receiving this email, I replied that the “applicant” is not affiliated with my company. Their reply had a more direct sales pitch, as expected:

Dear sir,

Many thanks for your confirmation.As soon as receiving the application of “NOA INDUSTRIAL LTD”.we checked and found “burbank” is your company’s registered trademark.So we inform you also that’s reason why we sent email to you.If you did not authorized such apply we suspect 2 points:

1. This company uses your brand  to build market in Asia.
2. This company may be doing your same business, or your competitors.

But you should know that The domain names regisration is open in China. so “NOA INDUSTRIAL LTD” has right to apply for the available domain names. For this reason ” NOA INDUSTRIAL LTD” is also licit applicant and we have no right to reject them.You only own the preferential rights to register them.

In addition.please inform us your company’s decision of this issue. if these domain names are important to your company.we can send you a dispute application form and help you register them. If these are not important.we will accept “NOA INDUSTRIAL LTD’s application. Thanks for your understanding.

Best Regards,
Alan jin

The emails look official, and some companies might worry that their brand mark could be abused. Just a head’s up that I’m not buying it, and I would bet if I check in 6 months from now NOA Industrial will not own Burbank.whatever either.

Growing up, I loved playing soccer, and I played on organized teams through high school. I never really enjoyed watching soccer on television, because I didn’t follow any teams or players. Lately, I’ve been watching English Premier League football games when I catch them on tv here in the US. This morning, I tuned in to the Arsenal vs. Tottenham game on ESPN2 and was surprised about the domain names I saw advertised.

When I was in the UK (and other European cities), I saw many more ccTLD domain names advertised than anything else. In the UK especially, I saw mostly .co.uk domain names used by advertisers. This morning, I didn’t see a single .co.uk domain name used in the stadium signage or uniforms, and I was very surprised. I know the Premier League is global, but I would have thought there would be more local advertising at the stadium.

Some of the domain names I saw advertised were Arsenal.com, Emirates.com, BarclaysTicketOffice.com (forwards to Barclays.co.uk), NikeFootball.com, PaddyPower.com, and Mansion.com.

I am sure that advertising at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium is very costly, and probably too much for most local companies. However, it was still surprising to see the urls that were used. I would have been less surprised if this was a World Cup game, because those will be truly global, but since it was a EPL game, I was surprised.

I don’t own a single .ME ccTLD domain name, and I have no plans to buy one any time in the near future, but I thought the following press release issued by the .ME Registry was interesting. They are partnering with WordPress to offer a URL shortener on the WP.me domain name.

In my opinion, this is a great marketing idea for the registry, because a domain extension’s usage in the market place is what makes consumers aware of its existence, leading consumers to purchase these domain names, which in turn adds value to owners of premium domain names. The more value they have, the more investors and consumers will want to purchase them – making it a win/win for all parties.

===

More than 225,000 bloggers will now be directing readers to their latest posts using a .Me domain extension, thanks to a newly announced partnership between the .ME Registry and popular blog creation site, WordPress.com. The agreement led to the creation of WP.Me – the world`s first two-letter .ME domain. WordPress is now offering the domain as a URL shortener…allowing its hosted bloggers to provide abbreviated links to their posts, and making it much easier to promote those links on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

“These short links are about 70 percent smaller than the permalinks for a given post,” says Matt Mullenweg, a co-founder of WordPress. “Thanks to our friends at the dot-ME Registry, WordPress is able to offer one of the shortest and most
effective URLs available today.”

According to Mullenweg, WP.Me is different from other URL shorteners in a variety of ways:

* Every blog and post on WordPress.com will now have a WP.Me URL.
* They only work with WordPress.com-hosted URLs.
* The links are permanent and will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
* WP.Me is spam-free because WordPress constantly monitors and removes spam from WP.com.

“Dot-ME embraces and celebrates this kind of innovation,” says Predrag Lesic, Executive Director of the .ME Registry. “In the short time dot-ME has existed, our domain extension has broken many barriers to become so much more than just another ccTLD. WordPress saw the potential of dot-ME and we applaud them for it.”

Visit WordPress.com to learn more about how to get your very own WP.Me URL.