This week, in Paris, regulators from Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted to radically change the way Top Level Domains are created.

A Top Level Domain (TLD) is the final segment of a domain name. For example, my blog’s URL is blog.techfun.org. That name tells us that blog is a host within the techfun domain which is within the ORG Top level domain.

Everyone knows about the earliest TLD’s including COM, NET, ORG, EDU, MIL, and GOV. Over the years that has expanded to a total of 21 TLD’s not including specific national TLD’s like US for the United States or DE for Germany. Some of those national TLDs have become popular due to the nation’s abbreviations similarity to English language words and abbreviations including Tuvalu’s “.tv”. The Federated States of Micronesia’s “.fm”, Djibouti’s “.dj” and Tonga’s “.to”.

More recently, ICANN introduced the BIZ TLD but adoption has been extremely slow. When the new BIZ TLD went live I was working for an Internet Service Provider and part of my job included maintaining our spam filters. The first thing I noticed in the weeks and months following was the sheer number of bogus and spamtastic BIZ domains flooding in to our servers.

In the early days of combating spam, a feature common on many mail servers was the ability to check to see if the domain portion of a sender’s email address was valid. Our servers used that, so if someone wanted to spam us from doctorsex@cheapbluesexpills.com they actually had to register the domain name “cheapbluesexpills.com”. Back then this was more expensive than it is now.

When the BIZ TLD was introduced, many registrars – like GoDaddy.com – offered very big discounts on the BIZ domains. This opened the door to spammers registering thousands and thousands of domain names to be used for a single mailing and then discarded. That poisoned the BIZ TLD for many folks and to this day I still let Spamassassin slightly bump up the spam score on any email I receive with a BIZ extension.

The new change that ICANN describes as the “Biggest Expansion to (the) Internet in Forty Years” takes the use of TLD’s to a whole new level. This new change will allow companies and people to apply to create their own TLD. For example, Coca-Cola can register a TLD of “COKE”. This would allow the use of mail addresses like webmaster@mail.coke or the creation of websites like http://www.coke or http://coupons.coke.

ICANN mentioned that there is already interest from various cities including New York City that want to create their own TLD – in that case, a site like http://mayor.nyc would be a possibility. Individuals, organizations, and corporations will all be able to apply for these new bits of Internet real estate.

The approval committees at ICANN will do its best to protect registered trademarks so there is no doubt who will end up owning .coke and .pepsi, but who is likely to get .cola or .soda? Company’s that wish to can submit objections to other applications but unless you have a retainer with an intellectual property law firm you may be out of luck when your small home business has a name that some bigger corporation decided it wants to own.

I wish I could articulate better why this whole idea disturbs me. I feel like the Internet has always been a kind of funky global neighborhood where a fetish shop might be ‘next door’ to an evangelical church. This kind of parceling off of the common Internet namespace feels like that neighborhood is at risk of being put in the shadow of huge custom condos that will block out the sun.

There is one bright side for non-English speaking nations:

“One of the most exciting prospect before us is that the expanding system is also being planned to support extensions in the languages of the world,” said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN’s Chairman. “This is going to be very important for the future of the Internet in Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia.” The present system only supports 37 Roman characters.

Internet address suffix choice expanded
By Rob Minto in London
Published: June 27 2008 03:00 – Financial Times.

Businesses will be free to choose any suffix they please for their internet addresses after a decision yesterday to expand the choices beyond current staples such as “.com”, “.co” and “.org”.

The decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to liberalise the online naming system – allowing the creation of customised domain names – follows a three-year project.

“What we are now considering is a global equivalent of people moving to liberalised telecommunication markets or electricity markets,” Paul Twomey, Icann’s chief executive, said at the organisation’s meeting in Paris.

Icann, a non-profit body that co-ordinates the naming system, plans to accept the first round of applications for new domain names in April or May next year. It expects the cost of registering a new suffix to be at least $100,000 (€64,00, £50,000) – far higher than the current price of a “.com” name, which is as little as $14.

Some analysts worry that the changes could yield more costs for businesses operating online as they try to protect their presence on the web.

The last large-scale domain launch – of “.biz” in 2001 – did not reduce the popularity and dependency on the “.com” suffix. Registrations for “.biz” have lagged far behind “.com”, with fewer than 2m names in use compared with more than 77m for “.com”. A 2002 Harvard Law School study found that about 30 per cent of “.biz” registrations were made by organisations that already owned the “.com” version of their name.

The new move is unlikely to cause an immediate surge in the number of customised domain names online.

Icann hopes the high cost and a rigorous application process will deter any “domain squatters”, who purchase company-related domain names and try to sell them back to the company for a profit.

Any disputes over names would be referred to an independent arbitrator, who would consider existing trademarks and intellectual property rights.

However, Alex Burmaster, an analyst at the internet research company Nielsen Netratings, said fraudsters and “domaineers” – who buy up groups of domain names – were likely to benefit from the changes.

“We could see an exponential rise in dispute cases,” he said. “The two biggest losers will be businesses and customers. It will be a big cost for companies, and confusing with all the potential domains.”

Jonathan Robinson, chief operating officer of NetNames, a consultancy and registration company, said he feared that the move “would dilute online brands, putting them at risk. I’m not convinced this is being done in the right way”.

Seattle based, Good To Be Green, Inc has released their latest tool for environmentally minded consumers looking for green building products in both the commercial and residential markets. This new feature, called Profiled Listings for Products, includes in-depth information on products, downloadable product documentation and automatically finds local retailers or contractor/installers in the user’s vicinity.

    The searchable directory is at http://www.goodtobegreen.com. I played around with it for a little while last night.  It’s a pretty nice idea that hopefully will grow more useful over time.  In the Find Residential Products section I did find lots of results that were worth looking into.  I found the Find Professional Services tool far less useful. 

    I started by looking for Green landscapers in Pennsylvania and found zero results.  I checked NJ since thats right across the river and again came up with none.  I widened my search to the entire mid-Atlantic region and finally got a hit for Donna Walcavage Landscape Architecture & Urban Design in Brooklyn, NY – a bit outside of my area. 

    I guess that shouldn’t be surprising for a new service that originated in the Pacific Northwest.   A search for Green landscapers in the Pacific region turned up three hits.

    What makes this directory a bit different from other most other online directories is that in order for a company to be listed, they must have a brick and mortar presence where people can purchase their products.

Chidozie Bright, President and CEO of Good To Be Green had this to say:

"This is win-win across the board for consumers, manufacturers, retailers, and contractors. Not only can people figure out what they can use as a building alternative, they can also read documentation and then follow through with buying it themselves at their local store or calling a local installer to do it for them. This takes the common directory to a whole new level by completing the retail circle, a far cry from the ‘here’s a list now you figure it out’ mentality."

Hopefully making information like this availiable to a wider audience will help people make a more informed and more environmentally safe and energy efficient  decisions when it comes to home building and remodeling.

Time capsule meets the internet!  

The100yearwebsite.com is a great way to gather together your pictures, video and audio clips, thoughts and text in a virtual time capsule which we will keep safe for you, for the next 100 years!!!

Choose to let others experience your capsule from day one, or bury it to be revealed at a future date that you can choose – perhaps a special anniversary, or any other date during the next century. 

So why not make a start and create your own contribution to history for future generations to enjoy! A capsule costs just £20 set up fee. Future hosting is then free.

This is a pretty cool idea.  We have moved towards digital lives.  The cost savings involved in dgital photography has resulted in people taking thousands and thousands of photographs that they would not have taken if film development costs were a factor. The problem with this massive accumulation of digital media is that the proverbial "average user"  is prone to data loss. 

People often find themselves performing a system restore at the behest of a tech support agent.  If your photos are on that drive they are now gone.  Many people feel they have covered their asses by burning off the photos and videos to CD or DVD.  Rather than give my own opinion of this, lets ask anyone reading this who once owned a Jazz or Zip drive about the problems with technology changes  as applied to long term data storage.  While I do store alot of data on DVD, I fully expect that there will come a time when those discs are useless on my primary workstation.

For only 20 pounds why not let someone else handle that problem for you?  Their FAQ says "We maintain an archived “high quality” original copy, and a compressed viewing copy. When the time comes to move to the next generation of viewer, we will run a program through the site, take a new copy of the original data, and replace the old viewing copy. This is called an active management system and ensures that we move along with new technology."

    I have a box of family photos that go back to sepia print times next to my desk.  I started a project of scanning them at one point but the potental headaches involved in truly long term storage of the digital version pf the photos convinced me not to bother – yet.  Seeing this solution has decided me that I should go through and pick out the most important items and get them into a time capsule of my own.

It only came out of beta a few months ago. It’s a great source of information for American political junkies like me.  Just this week they have rolled out a Widget called “Congress, I’m Watching”.

You can use it to put a sidebar item about bills in the House or Senate that you want to being to your readers attention. It’s a nice clean little widget that you can customize with your color scheme and it loads fast.  The link it creates takes you to the OpenCongress page for that bill with news and blog coverage of that bill.  I’m using one at the top of the left sidebar to highlight two bills.

Create your own widget here: http://www.opencongress.org/tools/watching

“Changing the Way America Reads”

Could the price of books possibly have gotten any more expensive? During any given week, the average bestseller lists for more than $20. Read three of these in a month and you’re spending over $60! What you’re paying for is the right to own the book… but is ownership what you really want?

Yes!  Ownership is what I really want – sometimes.  And I think its a bit arrogant to think that book addicts like me can’t  navigate out the ins and outs of book shopping.

Changing the Way America Reads?   I don’t think so.  I think it’s a daring and well meaning endeavor; I just can’t imagine it being an attractive solution for people who read as much as I do.

I first heard about this service when it was still under development almost a year ago. I signed up for their mailing list so I would be notified when the service went online.  At the time I didn’t think the service would be good for me since I get very possessive about books that I like.  I read a lot of non-fiction and while I have an excellent memory for the printed word, I often want to go back to a book to pull out a specific quote or stat for a blog posting or just to use as a tag line somewhere.

This service will do nothing to compete with book stores.  It may, however, draw patrons away from already struggling public libraries.

My first thought, upon reading about the Bookswim service, was that it was basically a for-profit lending library.  I live in Philadelphia, the home of the United State’s first free library system.

 Despite the free library system’s roots here, Philadelphia libraries have gone downhill in the last few years.  There have been a lot of cutbacks due to budgetary issues.  My local branch, the only one within walking distance of my house (shown above), is no longer open on Saturdays.  They close at 5:00pm most days.  They are open until 8:00pm on Mondays and Wednesdays, the two days I’m most likely to work late.  When we first moved to Philadelphia I used the library fairly frequently.  It was a great place to get books I knew I wouldn’t want to keep.  The selection at my local branch did not compare favorably with a full size Barnes and Noble store I pass going to and from the office.  And that BN store doesn’t compare to what is available via Amazon.com.

I think we are spoiled in terms of the availability of the written word.  I can go to a flea market and buy the $20-$30 books that Bookswim decries as overpriced for only a few dollars each.  I can shop Half.com and find a selection more like a full size bookstore at prices more like the flea market. I also make a point of checking out the sales and clearance section at QPB (Quality Paperback Books).  I agree with the folks at Bookswim that the price of new books has gotten fairly insane, however, my solution has been to just not buy new books.  I like the idea of the service, but I think  it would be best suited for people without any kind of library system nearby, or for shut-ins without Internet access.  But, for me,  it really comes down to my need to keep books.  I have more books than I have shelf space for at the moment.  I also have about thirty volumes lent out at any given time. 

Yesterday I looked at some beautiful hand crafted oak bookcases made by some of the Amish folks out in the York – Lancaster area.  The shelves I liked most ran about $225.00.  A years membership with Bookswim, at it’s lowest rate, runs $239.88 ($19.99 x 12).  I think I’ll have that money and put it into a new bookcase every year and keep shopping for gently used books on Half.com, QPB.com, and the local flea markets.

Does anyone think this service would fit their needs, and if so, what is it about the service that you find appealing?

I had decided several weeks ago that I wanted a cat, but had not really ever known where cat’s came from when you WANT one.  Every cat I have ever had or anyone I know had had had (hard to make a sentence with three hads in a row and it still makes sense) just kind of appeared or been dropped on them.  So, being a very resourceful person I checked  with the C|Net shoppers guide.  They had a lot of things called CADs and CAMs, but I was pretty sure I wanted to stay with my original plan of getting a CAT.  For once, spelling counted.  Realizing that C|Net and Z-Net weren’t much help I tried http://www.givemeacat.com/.  Well, apparently something was wrong and site was unavailable.

    I was growing desperate.  I decided to check EBay.  Well, believe it or not they do not seem to have any cat’s on auction at that time.  They did have many many catalogs but not having much of a yard not owning a fireplace, I decided, again, to stick  my plan of just getting a plain cat.

    It occurred to me at that point that maybe I was barking up the wrong tree, if you will excuse the cross species expression.  After careful investigation if the list of newsgroups carried by my company I noticed a GLARING omission.     There were over thirty-five thousand groups but no rec.pets.cats.available.now.  Just to be sure the area I wanted wasn’t misfiled under some other group that used less common terms (Usenet is an international entity you know) I decided to investigate any groups that contained terms that could be directly or loosely considered slang or euphemisms for a cat.

    Much of this investigating involved downloading and decoding binary files that I believe were either ads for cat’s for sale or some sort of online cat show for which prizes are probably awarded.  I am assuming it was an international competition because some of the cats had no hair.  Finally, after sifting through thousands of entries, I finally found one labeled “Free Pussy” so I looked closer.  I admit, it did not look like a very good cat.  I think maybe it was tired or just not very photogenic.  My thought at the time was that it was a loser from last years International Pussy/Cat Show and Competition.  I figured that ones who did not win were possibly given away like greyhounds are sometimes.

    One of my co-workers, who often claims to be an expert on pussy, was in the office that day.  I called him over and asked his opinion. (I know, I know, it was a free pussy but I didn’t want to be saddled with huge vet bills just because I failed to have it checked out by an expert.  After all, you don’t buy a used car without having it looked over my a mechanic.)
    My co-worker informed me that it was not a pussy that would be good for my needs.  He said it looked high maintenance and would problem be expensive to keep healthy.  He also informed me that many rude people on Usenet send out pictures saying Free Pussy to get prospective pet owners to download them and look and they are not REAL cats at all!!

    I decided that Usenet was not the best place to look for a cat and probably the internet itself was not a great place to shop for things with working lungs.

    Coincidentally, at that same time I ran out of Wintergreen Velamints®.

Fate had picked that day to give me a wedgie of inspiration and I got in my car drove to my local store of convenience.  While waiting to pay for my small minty treats I happened to look down and saw a stack of reconstituted tree flesh.  I picked the top bundle off the stack and examined it.  As I looked it over I got to the head of the line and the cashier asked, “Do you want that paper too?”.  Its funny how if you hold something that you don’t know the name of and wait long enough somebody will just tell you eventually.  I said, “Yes.”

    I took my purchases home, leaned back in my chair, popped a Velamint in my mouth, enjoyed the cool mint sensation on my tongue, readjusted the chair, sipped my ice tea, cleared a spot on my computer desk, cleaned off  a little spot where I guess I had set down a glass with a wet bottom on some cigarette ash with Windex and a sock,  put the sock on the floor, and opened the “paper”.

    Inside were many articles, much like the ones you find on some websites.

I read a few but found it boring since the hyperlinks (indicated “Continued on page B3″) did not seem to work.  Also, I was irritated that I could not adjust the font size.  About half way though the pile a large number of banner ads fell out and nearly gave me a nasty paper cut on my foot.

    By minimizing the banner ads, I found a section called The Classifieds.

It seemed to list jobs and other things that were available and some even had URLs of the company with empty desks but their coder showed once again that he  clearly doesn’t know a hyperlink from a hiccough.  Towards the end of that section I found a column entitled Pets, and below that Cats For Sale.  I held the page closer to my eyes (accidentally discovering how to increase the font size) and read down the column.  Many cat’s were being offered at prices ranging from $30.00 to $200.00; however, there were several that claimed to be FREE.  Having been burned on that Usenet “Free Pussy” scam I was wary.  I read the fine print and didn’t find the usual disclaimers that tell you the first week is free and then $19.95 a month, or anything like that.

    I picked one that seemed promising.  Some people were moving to a new are that, apparently, had a ban on pussies.  They had several cat’s but her mother was taking those.  The one she was offering was one she had rescued from Camden, NJ where some children were trying to light him on fire.  This cat wouldn’t treat other pussies in a polite and respectful manner, often invading their personal space and, now this is purely conjecture, trying to get the other cat’s to engage in some kind of intricate dance that involved howling and bloodletting.

    I did not particularly want a Goth cat, but I had decided that since, thanks to Nancy Reagan, I knew how to “Just say No” I could run the risk of opening my home to such a needful animal.

    I went over to meet him and we got along great.  He is so sweet as long as no other cats come near him.  Me and my white haired, green eyed, ear functioning kitty are happy together.