Dot INFO - Fall from Grace

[DryHeat]

90% of the world WILL require IDN to get the optimal online experience as their first language is not English.

Microsoft, Versign, Sedo and Google are all working hard not only to help make IDN a reality, but also to grab their share of the new markets that this will open up.

The Chinese government amongst others are lobbying hard to get IDN implemented and adopted, as well as investing money in educating people in the use of IDN.

So, once again if I am not misreading you, this IDN phenomenon has yet to happen at some time in future and you are dearly invested in it. Therefore, its quite natural and understandable that you carry a highly optimistic stance about it. !! Its nothing unusual, just basic human psychology....in fact quite essential for us humans to be motivated about any objective in our life in order to persevere....some of us are having this in other areas such as .info....!! Now, while your emotional cathexis to the success of IDNs is very understandable, your passion about .info's failure is bit more complex and mysterious!

 

[Rubber Duck]

So, once again if I am not misreading you, this IDN phenomenon has yet to happen at some time in future and you are dearly invested in it. Therefore, its quite natural and understandable that you carry a highly optimistic stance about it. !! Its nothing unusual, just basic human psychology....in fact quite essential for us humans to be motivated about any objective in our life. Now, while your emotional cathexis to the success of IDNs is very understandable, your passion about .info's failure is bit more complex and mysterious!

I refer you to my last response to Seeker on this thread.

A further point is that IDN will allow massive expanion of the dot com registry by allowing a huge increase in the number of meaningful search terms that can be registered globally. A dot com registry in the region of 500M domains is envisageable once IDN has been fully implemented. This would greatly reduce the requirement for alternative TLDs.


Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[DryHeat]

I refer you to my last response to Seeker on this thread.

I do read you as follows:

Dot info certainly lost a lot of momentum through this ludicrous giveaway, and would appear that a resurgent dot net has now stolen a lot of its thunder. Dot org promises to do well as they are offering cheap domains in third world locations, which in my view is a much more solid strategy than the one pursued by Affilias.

Not sure if you know but many .info well-wishers believe that the giveaway was a brilliant move on part of Afilias that jump-started the tld....who knows if it was brilliant or dumb....we'd probably find out in next 3-6 months when all the freebies come up for renewals....but everyone is entitled to have an opinion and you happen to have yours; i.e. it was suicidal on part of Afilias to decide on the giveaway.

A further point is that IDN will allow massive expanion of the dot com registry by allowing a huge increase in the number of meaningful search terms that can be registered globally. A dot com registry in the region of 500M domains is envisageable once IDN has been fully implemented. This would greatly reduce the requirement for alternative TLDs.

I wish you all the luck with IDNs....as for me I've had enough of these futuristic dreams in the domain world since 2001 when I first started...don't have the stamina for any more.... It'd be just nice if folks like myself do end up with some decent ROI on our current holdings....you don't seem to think so...oh well !!

 

[seeker]

It is funny how some compare .cn to .info

.cn is a regulated, strictly government controled TLD, which a lot of the times, the people within the country can not even see (until the country breaks up to 100 different nations as I have told D before ), of course even google doesnt show up many times from within China, not to mention other sites. It is funny how some people think in this age of information, such a made up society can last and not implode.
.info is an international GLOBAL TLD that means .information (isnt that what the internet is about????) in a dozen of languages.
I can listen to arguments for and against .info , all is fair.
But when people start comparing it to .cn, well, that is like comparing a Lamborgini to a Yugo.
It is beyond ironic that I see people 'worrying' about .info and yet supporting .cn
.cn is wortheless IMHO, and in comparision to .info, it is about 10% of its price (with reasonable comparison).
But that is the beauty with opinions, we are all free to say whatever we like.... ,
In most parts of the world, and in most tlds, certainly not all in all of them.

 

[Rubber Duck]

It is funny how some compare .cn to .info

.cn is a regulated, strictly government controled TLD, which a lot of the times, the people within the country can not even see (until the country breaks up to 100 different nations as I have told D before ), of course even google doesnt show up many times from within China, not to mention other sites. It is funny how some people think in this age of information, such a made up society can last and not implode.
.info is an international GLOBAL TLD that means .information (isnt that what the internet is about????) in a dozen of languages.
I can listen to arguments for and against .info , all is fair.
But when people start comparing it to .cn, well, that is like comparing a Lamborgini to a Yugo.
It is beyond ironic that I see people 'worrying' about .info and yet supporting .cn
.cn is wortheless IMHO, and in comparision to .info, it is about 10% of its price (with reasonable comparison).
But that is the beauty with opinions, we are all free to say whatever we like.... ,
In most parts of the world, and in most tlds, certainly not all in all of them.

Actually, I am not a huge fan of dot CN in that sense. I have about 18 left, which are nearly all popular 3 letter Acronyms.

I have registered my IDN as dot coms, so frankly it won't matter to me if the country does break up into separate republics. People will still speak Chinese and dot com will still be releveant.

With dot cn reasonable comparisons are not possible as the most popular terms will be meaningless in English, but having sold several dot CN, I have had prices comparable to good dot info sales.

It is interesting to note that you can be directed staight to websites now even in Chinese by just inputting a search string directly into the address bar of the browsers. Most seem to default to dot coms. Firefox seems to default to the top search result in Google, which is significant as Google is now displaying IDN URLs in local characters. It must be assumed that its indexing system will now pick up those characters in the URL. This is a huge advance, as it will make IDN names a must have for SEO.

In my opinion, if Dot Info wants to be truly global then it should roll out its IDN programme to include languages, such as Chinese and Arabic. Nobody is going truly global in the English Language!

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[DryHeat]

Non-English Domain Names Likely Delayed....Phishing Concerns Likely to Delay Expansion of Domain Names Beyond Non-English Characters

Thought I should educate myself a bit about IDNs...and this was one of the first things I came across upon "Googling" the term...(News from 2 months ago; 7/15/05):http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=944251

Vint Cerf, head of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, would not speculate on when such characters might appear but said Internet engineers must now spend time "trying to winnow down, frankly, the number of character (sets) that are allowed to be registered."

But then again in the fast moving world of www it might be an old news and a fix might already have been found by now...!

Just located this informative chart indicating that many/most countries highly prefer their ccTLDs over .com...negating the argument (made above) that anything other than .com is an "alternate" tld for which there'd be no need after implementation of IDNs....

http://chart.info/stats14.htm

 

[Rubber Duck]

Thought I should educate myself a bit about IDNs...and this was one of the first things I came across upon "Googling" the term...(News from 2 months ago; 7/15/05):http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=944251


But then again in the fast moving world of www it might be an old news and a fix might already have been found by now...!

Well things have moved on a bit since then, indeed the article was largely out of date before it was written. I see Vint Cerf has been put out to Grass at Google.

Phishing is an issue but to date it remains primarily a problem using dud extensions and other techniques that don't rely on IDN.

As I understand it registration of domains that mix Cyrillics and other Latin Derived characters mixed with the ASCII characters recognised by the DNS are now barred.

There has been a lot work done on browser security as well, some as quick fixes often knee jerk reactions, others will such as those being introduced with IE 7.0 have been worked out of a longer period of time.

None of this will have much relevence in the keymarkets of Asia as all domains showing local characters will be IDN. Infact will with 10 years nearly all domains used out there will be IDN!

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[DryHeat]

Infact will with 10 years nearly all domains used out there will be IDN!

Not sure about this one here....I'm from Asia and know for fact that many Asian countries start with English as a second language in middle and high schools and have English as their primary language of higher education. Most have English language newspapers, magazines, and readership....don't understand why for their online activities they'd go exclusively non-English?

 

[Rubber Duck]

Not sure about this one here....I'm from Asia and know for fact that many Asian countries start with English as a second language in middle and high schools and have English as their primary language of higher education. Most have English language newspapers, magazines, and readership....don't understand why for their online activities they'd go exclusively non-English?

The defacto truth is that Searching in these countries is almost exclusively done in local characters. Google now displays IDN URLs in local characters:

http://www.idnforums.com/index.php/topic,42.0.html

This will mean that IDN is a must for SEO in the key markets of Asia.

IDN will also enable massive expansion of the dot com registry, which will go unchallenged if dot Info and the like do not support these kinds of domains.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[DryHeat]

...which will go unchallenged if dot Info and the like do not support these kinds of domains.

Not sure about others but Afilias and .info has been supporting IDNs for a long while now.

 

[Rubber Duck]

Not sure about others but Afilias and .info has been supporting IDNs for a long while now.

Yes, Afilias was fast off the mark with the support of Western European Character sets but has not made the important step of supporting wider character sets to my knowledge. I believe this is in the pipe at dot org.

Of course if you have more up to date information on this I would welcome any input or indeed you could post at:

www.idnforums.com

You will need to register here, but there is no fee.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[seeker]

afilias supports every character set that info stands for informartion (which I admit are mostly European based languages).
and that makes sense, becase in a language that .info doesnt mean information, why have afilias have IDN support???

 

[Rubber Duck]

afilias supports every character set that info stands for informartion (which I admit are mostly European based languages).
and that makes sense, becase in a language that .info doesnt mean information, why have afilias have IDN support???

Well, the reason is that the first level of the domain will soon be translated into local languages using local characters.

The first to do this will be dot CN. Initially, a limited no of ccTLDs will be given DNS support to allow this happen fairly shortly I believe.

With gTLDs things will take a little longer as they will require multi-channel translation. It is likely that this will be done later using Browser Support.

Dot Info will therefore be translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Arabic and other languages, oh and of course Greek. This will of course be total futile, if you cannot register the stem or second level of a dot info in any of these languages.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[Smith]

I don't think that I would look too deep into the number of pages indexed in Google.

I know some large se spammers that use .info because they are cheap "throw away" domain names that you can get for a buck or two and then use and abuse. Once Google pulls the 1000's of pages indexed on any particular domain name they just move on to another name and let the old name drop.

 

[Rubber Duck]

I don't think that I would look too deep into the number of pages indexed in Google.

I know some large se spammers that use .info because they are cheap "throw away" domain names that you can get for a buck or two and then use and abuse. Once Google pulls the 1000's of pages indexed on any particular domain name they just move on to another name and let the old name drop.

So are you saying that the 1% of total web content served by dot info is mainly Spam? This gets worse!

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[DryHeat]

So are you saying that the 1% of total web content served by dot info is mainly Spam? This gets worse!

After seriously pondering over the issue I have come to the conclusion that in fact .info is crap and hopeless venture. Therefore, I have decided to drop all my .info names and dismantle my .info websites such as www.NewOrleans.info www.Camping.info www.Pregnancy.info www.AirlineTickets.info www.Branson.info www.VacationRentals.info and dozens others like them even though they are making me decent $$ today and I have had repeat 5 figure offers for many of them....Further, I am thinking of getting a second-mortgage to invest in IDNs..... :-D

 

[seeker]

.info works fine with Greek IDN letters.
but information or info do not mean anything in Greek, it is a different word, so there would be no purpose to reg Greek letters for .info
the same for Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi or whatever.
.info makes sense in Languages that info means information, almost all of Europe and in different parts of the world.

 

[Rubber Duck]

.info works fine with Greek IDN letters.
but information or info do not mean anything in Greek, it is a different word, so there would be no purpose to reg Greek letters for .info
the same for Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi or whatever.
.info makes sense in Languages that info means information, almost all of Europe and in different parts of the world.

Not sure what you mean.

The translations would presumable in consultation with Afilias would be selected on the basis of being the most suitable equivalent in each language. The individual letter would not necessary transpose as especially in certain languages like Chinese that concept would be meaningless.

It is likely that "info" in Chinese would translate as 信息 and in Japanese
as 情報.

Once people became familar with the localised characters to them that would be dot info.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[gpmgroup]

Not sure what you mean.

The translations would presumable in consultation with Afilias would be selected on the basis of being the most suitable equivalent in each language. The individual letter would not necessary transpose as especially in certain languages like Chinese that concept would be meaningless.

It is likely that "info" in Chinese would translate as M‘§ and in Japanese
as î•ñ.

Once people became familar with the localised characters to them that would be dot info.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

Wouldn't that require 2 new gTLDs?
.M‘§ & .î•ñ

And couldn't ICANN just award two new similiar .com addresses in which case wouldn't the current IDN.info's and IDN.com's be superceeded?

Sorry my squiggles were not as neat as yours :huh:

 

[JuniperPark]

After seriously pondering over the issue I have come to the conclusion that in fact .info is crap and hopeless venture. Therefore, I have decided to drop all my .info names and dismantle my .info websites such as www.NewOrleans.info www.Camping.info www.Pregnancy.info www.AirlineTickets.info www.Branson.info www.VacationRentals.info and dozens others like them even though they are making me decent $$ today and I have had repeat 5 figure offers for many of them....Further, I am thinking of getting a second-mortgage to invest in IDNs..... :-D

That's what I love about this thread -- people seriously arguing about whether something is success after it as PROVEN to be successful.