NNNNN.com update

It seems that a Chinese company has many NNNNN.com domains on backorder (most) and gets them rather quickly and efficiently. They then turn around and sell them in the mid $xx range ($35-$75). This is a nice little bump for the values of these domains.

In reality, people have been asking low to mid $xx for them ($25-$35) and most have been selling in the $15-$25 range. The price has gone up a little but nothing too huge right now.

Stay tuned for more details.

Consumers stand up for their rights: Network Solutions sued!

It's amazing where the general populace will act when ICANN won't.

Network Solutions, a domain registrar, has been under scrutiny because of a policy. You search for a domain that you are interested in there, THEY register it (without your permission), park it (making money), then force you to pay their $35 registration fee (as opposed to every one else's $7-$10). They can do this with a 5-day grace period where people who buy domains can get a full refund if they decide they do not want the domain (say you spell it wrong etc..).

This is the equivalent of shopping for a car. When you find the exact car you want, the dealership charges you 3X the sticker price and buys all of the same models in the area (or disallows other dealerships to sell it). ICANN is in the USA, they should know about capitalism but obviously don't support it. ICANN has investigated this issue and "found nothing wrong" but now people are fed up.

The law firm is also suing ICANN for allowing this to go on despite the complaints and concerns. Good for them. No one went after RegisterFly after they lost their ICANN backing (and tens of thousands of people lost their domains because of it). ICANN allowed them to continue on with questionable practices and they're doing the same with Network Solutions.

It's good to see that ICANN is (finally) being held responsible for their lack of action, maybe they'll wisen up and start paying attention to what is actually going on in this industry.

New site added!

I've put up another site:

http://www.seismicblog.com

Check it out. I even have a forum full of RSS feeds from USGS (and other sources as I find them):
http://www.seismicblog.com/SMF/

A few more NNNNN.com sales..

Not a lot sold, ut a few did sell the past few days:

Seller was selling:
42148.com
04386.com
04379.com
And wanted $35 for the bunch.

It sold for $30 in less than an hour (IMO the seller should have waited) on DNForum.com. $10 each - not much more than a registration fee and quite a bargain to the buyer, IMO.

Two other sales were reported the past couple of days:
91200 - $73
12682 - $21

Not bad. The first one is a premium name (multiple of 100) and the second one would be more like most NNNNN.com sales.

Palm Beach County - Is this communism or are you just insane?

This is part of Palm Beach County's new pet law:


I have been chatting on one of my breed group lists about these
legislative nightmares and just had some scary feedback from Palm Beach FL.

Palm Beach county is now hiring deputized volunteers. They call the volunteers s the Citizens Pet Patrol. These volunteers will act as puppy buyers, call on ads, call clubs for referrals, roam the neighborhoods, and yes, even dog shows. If they find anything they "THINK" might be wrong or against their agenda, they will run to get a warrant to enter your home. The hobby breeders who have a permit from the county have already given implied consent to these people to enter their homes by signing the permit.

Here is some language directly off the volunteer application:

*You must have a car and be able to volunteer 4 hours a day two days a week.

*Responsibilities involve setting up educational booths at pet supply stores, special events in the county (dog shows, perhaps?) and schools.

Additional roles include patrolling known problem areas for non-compliant issues and report findings to AC.

The volunteers are said to be mostly AR's who apparently have nothing better to do.

My breeder friends are terrified and feel they can no longer allow potential puppy buyers to come to their homes to visit the puppies.

(end quote)

WHAT THE HELL? Are we in Nazi America now? Citizen patrollers / tattle tales / uneducated animal freaks can just volunteer and easily get a warrant so THEY can enter your house?

Sorry, I thought this was America, home of the free. Well, this isn't freedom. In fact, this is the government intruding into your house. Yes, the government is once again telling us how to live our lives.

Hey Palm Beach, here's something to do: GO AFTER THE PEOPLE CAUSING THE PROBLEMS! You know DAMN WELL that the people abusing the animals will easily volunteer so they can keep their abused animals and go after the legitimate people trying to improve the animals lives. APRI registered "breeders" will go after ethical breeders and you'll be left with poorly bred, poorly raised, poorly trained, poorly kept animals all over the county. They're punishing the people who do things the right way.

I knew this law was a bad idea when I first head it and it is obvious that the people who wrote this have no clue about animals, breeding, training, or even how to raise them (and having a kitty cat you got from the shelter DOES NOT COUNT!!).

Grow up Palm Beach politicians.

NNNNN.com - the increase begins

It's started - NNNNN.com domains are now selling higher than a reg fee (whereas a few weeks ago, the "bad" ones sold for a registration fee or lower.

Here's a recap of some recent sales (and where they were sold):
Snapnames:
01140.com $22
00108.com $29
05211.com $22

NamePro
87816.com $12.5
87826.com $12.5
37535.com $12.5
37675.com $12.5
38417.com $12.5

72252.com $15
82292.com $15
71131.com $15
75525.com $15
72292.com $15
37467.com $15

(Thank you to Michael Goldman for posting these here: DNForum.com )

Not much, the lowest going $12.50 but that's a 25$ to 50% increase over a registration fee (depending on when they were bought, it could be as high as a 100% price increase).
The "better" ones are already $25 each, not bad for some domains that were being registered for $7-$10 a week ago.

Sales are very low at this time but I've already seen an increase in the prices of NNN.com and NNNN.com domains. I'd say in a few months these NNNNN.com domains will rise up in value. If you can, grab some, even "bad" ones for $10-$15 each then wait a few months, even the bad ones then might be $25-$30 each.

Just like that they're all gone

Sometime before 7:00AM EST (roughly noon GMT) all the NNNNN.com domains were registered not including drops. I take no shame to admit that I was part of this virtual land rush, purchasing a few of these domains over the past few weeks.

What’s an “NNNNN.com” domain you ask? It is a reference to a domain that only consists of 5-numbers, for example 12345.com. In the domaining world, there are pseudo-acronyms like this. CCCCC.com is a domain consisting of 5 alpha-numeric characters (1A4RXC.com), LLLL.com is a domain consisting of 4-letters (ABCD.com) and CCVV.com is a domain consisting of two constantans followed by two vowels (BBAA.com).

Big deal some people say. To some, it is a very big deal.

First of all, everyone who was lucky enough to register a NNNN.com should expect a sharp increase in their values. Why? No, NNNNN.com domains will sell for about what NNNN.com domains sold when they sold out. Since the NNNNN.com domains are now selling for higher prices, NNNN.com domains will jump in price (the fewer characters, the more valuable the domain is). I’ve seen a couple people trying to get into the post-action quickly (and cheaply) by offering minimum $15-$25 for these NNNNN.com domains (not bad for an investment that cost between $6 and $10 a few days to a week ago).

Who cares about 5-number domains. They can’t be used for anything!

Wrong! Think about zip codes (all the zip code domains have been registered for years and are considered extremely valuable now). This includes zip codes outside the US (some were still available last night!). Some say dates, I don’t like that idea. Eh, I’ll pass on the date, I don’t see many people typing in 10108 for January 1, 2008, we can keep these for the NNNNNN.com domains). What else? Addresses? MainStreet.15000.com has a nice ring to it (not the best, but not bad either).

A lot of cultures use numbers as a part of their beliefs (numerology). A good combination of numbers might be worth a lot to them. You can have a PhD in mysticism but still not even know a fraction of these cultures. Research and find good ones that might still be available.

Why are numeric domains so valuable? I thought it was all about letters.

Letters are good, and many LLLLL.com domains are available, but they are far more common than number domains. Consider this:

LL.com domains – 676 combinations

NN.com domains – 100 combinations

6:1 Ratio

LLL.com domains – 17,576 combinations

NNN.com domains – 1,000 combinations

17:1 Ratio

LLLL.com domains – 456,976 combinations

NNNN.com domains – 10,000 combinations

45:1 Ratio

LLLLL.com domains – 11,881,376 combinations

NNNNN.com domains – 100,000 combinations

118:1 ratio

See where this is going? The more characters, the rarer the numbered domains become and this ratio grows exponentially as there are more characters added. IN any economy, the rarer something is the more valuable it becomes.

What’s next?

Some people will sell their NNNNN.com domains for a quick profit; others will sit on them for a while to see where the market goes. Some are now looking at NNNNN.net, NNNNN.org and other TLDs (top level domains, like .com, .org, .info etc...). Others will take a step back and seriously look at CCCC.com domains (still plenty of these available), CCC.net, CCC.org (plenty of these available, too). I have my plans on what to do next.

There are many doors that are wide open that may be closed by the end of this year. Don’t go crazy and go broke doing this, but with some research, time, and patience, you might find a little nugget of gold that will be very valuable someday for as little as $10.

I’ll see you at the next milestone party and I’ll bring the sandwiches.

The letter Y, please help us understand you.

I never understood the concept of "and sometimes Y". Does Y wake up some mornings and think "I want to be a vowel today!" then the next day, it's in a bad mood and says "screw it, I'm a consonant".

Does it switch during the day? A is a pain to Y so Y says "Screw you, A, I'm going to be a vowel now and hang out with T".

Do you think it is upbringing? Was the old English Y (Th) mean to our modern day Y? Y didn't want to have a lisp like the TH pair so he went out on his own against the family business and went the EE way?

Or, does the old English Y (Th) and it's ancestors have some genetic difference causing Y to go both ways?

Y, we love you, please let us understand you. The texters love you because you can replace a whole word (like B, U "Y U L8").

Do you just hang with the vowels to seem more popular (all words have to have a vowel, you know!) and sometimes like being in a bigger pond with the other 19 constants?Also, Y, the letter I misses you, when was the last time you two were together? You were yipping for joy.

Raffles should be fun, right?

If you don’t agree with the title stop reading now.

OK, so raffles should be fun. You go to an event and decide to help support the club or whoever is having the raffle and buy some tickets.

They’re fun until you realize you don’t have any chance of winning.

I was at an event this weekend and they had a raffle to help support the hosting club. I bought tickets in the morning (right after the person running the raffle bought over 200 tickets for “friends”. I put my tickets in the items I wanted (it was a raffle with many prizes and you put your ticket with the prize you want).

Later on, about 30 minutes before the drawing I bought more tickets. One item had one ticket in it so I put 3 tickets in there.

The drawing came and I noticed something fishy.

The person doing the drawing would pull out several tickets, look though them and pick one of the ones she drew out to “win” (many people, myself included, wrote our last names on the ticket). The one that had one ticket in it she pulled them all out (not many), went though 2 and announced the “winner” of the second to last ticket she had.

Then it came to the gift card section of the raffle. They had a little girl who was “unaffiliated with the club” (even though her parents and grandparents are club members). Oddly enough, she had different color tickets, ones they sold later in the day and sold very few. This little girl would look inside the cups, move the tickets around and find the tickets that matched the ones she and her family had. Sure enough, they ended up winning over $150 in gift cards with what looked like about $20 worth of tickets (over $1,000 worth of tickets were sold).

Then the person heading the drawing starts up again. Pulling out several tickets, then picking one. I later checked, out of 100+ prizes, 40 were won by tickets that had numbers within 200 lower than my lowest tickets (being the tickets she purchased for her friends right before I bought mine). Hmm, well over 2,000 tickets were sold and 40% of the prices went to a group of tickets purchased by the person running it (less than 10% of the total tickets sold). I won't even include the number of her friends what won with tickets they purchased.

I’ve participated in many raffles before and most have been fair, but this one was so blatantly obvious at the level of corruption that I do not want to deal with this club anymore nor would I ever even think of supporting their “raffles” anymore. I might as well just hand my money over to the club officers.

Elections are over

Yep. The primaries are over here in south Florida and the politicians have left in HUGE numbers, how typical. Now they're all off to their respective states (probabaly where they're behind in the polls) telling the super-Tuesday states how much they care about them.

I'm glad. No more phone calls from them telling me how much the recorded message cares about me. No more mud-flining ads, false advertising from the poloticians, and no more having their faces plastered every two seconds on TV.

My question now is: WHO IS GOING TO PICK UP ALL OF THE DAMN SIGNS???

Seriously, these campaign groups should take care of their own trash and should be fined for littering if they do not go around and pick up the thousands of signs on roads, medians, public parks, and so on, and if you have one on your front lawn, throw it out now or at least bring it inside incase your candidate makes it to the final election.