ICANN proposed a change in their policies that could make domain tasting very uneconomical. Their proposal involves simply charging a small, non-refundable, fee as soon as a domain is registered. With this small fee, ICANN hopes to discourage domain tasters who register millions of domains and then cancel and request refunds for the low money makers. ICANN’s numbers for January 2007 show that the top 10 domain tasters requested refunds for 45,450,897 domains. At that rate, a $1 or $0.50 fee should make this practice very unattractive. The proposed plan still needs to be approved as part of ICANN’s annual budget.

[tags]icann, domain tasting[/tags]

A lot of web companies have received a lot of funding so far this week and most of them seem to be in the social networking/social media space.

• MocoSpace, a mobile-only social network raised $4 million from existing investors. They previously raised $3 million a year ago.
• The Rubicon Project – they help websites place and optimize ads from other ad networks – closed $15 million just three months after closing a $6 million round. But at least they brought in $1 million in revenue for the last three months.
• Downloadable music, video, and movie provider 7digital closed $8.5 million.
• Visible Measures closed $13.5 million to track video engagement. Their software captures every play, pause, rewind, and email-to-a-friend button that viewers click.
• Relatively unknown social network Moli raised $29.6 million, bring their total funding to $55.6 million. In December, the site has just 48,000 visitors.
• Treedia Labs grabbed $5 million. They’re responsible for podcast.com and videocast.com.
• Mig33 closed $13.5 million, adding to the $10 million they raised in May.
• StyleFeeder got another $2 million to add to the $1 million they got last year.
• Social Network Yonja closed $12.5 million.
• hi5 took on $15 million in debt financing. hi5 is a social network claiming 70+ million users, but doesn’t show on the list of top 10 social networks published by Neilson.
• Social shopping site, ThisNext, raised an additional $5 million bringing their total funding to $7.5 million.
• ShoZu, a London-based company in the social media space, closed $12 million.
• Etsy the “eBay for hanmade goods” closed $27 million.

It’s clear from just 3 days of annoucements that there is a ton of money sloshing around in the social networking/media space now, and the web as a whole again. Just this week, $165 million in funding has been announced.

Charter Communications accidentally deleted the contents of 14,000 customer email accounts last week. Charter spokesperson Anita Lamont said, “There is no way to retrieve the messages, photos, and other attachments that were erased from inboxes and archive folders across the country…. We really are sincerely sorry for having had this happen and do apologize to all those folks who were affected by the error.” Charter has decided to apply a $50 credit to the bill of each affected customer. Charter deletes inactive email accounts every three months. This error happened during this normal maintenance operation.

Now, for those of us geeks in the know… we know that these service providers do not typically backup this kind of data. Even web hosting providers, while the perform backups, don’t guarantee the integrity of those backups. Charter and many other providers are making a colossal business mistake here.

Google Blogoscoped has found Google Docs Offline Access to be in development/testing on one of Google’s experimental sites. The functionality uses Google Gears, a Firefox and Internet Explorer extension that allows web apps to provide offline access through Javascript APIs. Sadly, the blogger wasn’t able able to edit or view documents. He was able to see the documents listed — renaming them and starring them successfully. So, this feature is clearly in early development. But it is certainly a move in the right direction for online productivity suites.

[tags]google docs, offline access[/tags]

Amy Jussel, a blogger at ShapingYouth.org was essentially told to go away by Target. Ms. Jussel called Target’s public relations department questioning a new ad campaign which featured a woman splayed across a big target pattern (the Target logo) with the bull’s-eye at her crotch. The New York Times asks, do you think bloggers should expect to be treated the same as traditional media outlets?

I say, absolutely not. Bloggers, like myself, have absolutely no method for being credentialed as a legitimate journalist. Anyone can throw up a blog and call themselves a journalist. Really, it’s up to the individual companies to decide how they are going to treat bloggers. Some companies, like Network Solutions, respond to my inquiries. Some don’t. The companies that respond and communicate with bloggers are probably the same companies that would also answer Joe Consumer’s questions through their PR people. It’s up to each individual company to make the decision and Target shouldn’t be chastised for deciding not to talk with an uncredentialed blogger.

Nevermind that this woman’s complaint is rediculous… “?¢â‚¬?“Targeting crotches with a bull?¢â‚¬â„¢s-eye is not the message we should be putting out there,?¢â‚¬A? she said in an e-mail interview.” It’s no wonder Target takes the viewpoint they do. I’d bet that 90% of the blogger inquiries Target receives are from people making stupid claims.

Remember way back to 20 days ago when it was found that Network Solutions was registering domains as people searched for them. Well, now in a brilliant move of hind-sight, they are informing their customers of the act now.

I still think it’s a shady practice. “By holding the searched domains at Network Solutions for a short period, it allows our customers to take the time to decide whether this is the domain name that they really want to register.” Well, at Network Solutions prices customers better think long and hard about registering that domain. If they used a less expensive registrar, then wouldn’t have to think so much that Network Solutions needs to resort to this kind of thing.

(By the way NetSol… was it really necessary to register “about-networksolutions.com“?)

[tags]network solutions, domains, domain registration[/tags]

After reportedly spending $1 million dollars on the launch event, QTrax has been caught with their flaming pants down.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch threw out a big “told you so”, stating that the era of paid music downloads are coming to an end. Arrington thinks that QTrax,a new peer-to-peer music network that has signed all four major labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal, and Warner), is the next step to completely free, DRM-free music downloads. But, Mike, I’m responding to your “told you so” with a big “not so fast.”

Domain tasting has clearly become a problem. It has become so bad, Network Solutions even devised a way to profit from “protecting” its customers from it. But according to a confidential informant to the DomainTools blog, Google is going to do something about making domain tasting less profitable.

Fast Company will redesign Robert Scoble’s blog and begin selling ads on his behalf as part of his move to Fast Company. Scoble has long said that he doesn’t have ads on his blog because he doesn’t trust someone who is just in it for the money. But does having ads on one’s site really mean that they are just in it for the money? Does a blogger accepting money for advertising automatically create bias?