There are approximately 68 million .COM domains registered today compared to around 400,000 nz domains you can see that .com still reigns supreme

But if there are over 68 million domain names out on the Internet  many are just parked in some obsolete spot gathering dust and all kinds of age. There is a growing number of domainers that either buy domains to sell on, to keep, or to hi-jack by cyber squatting.  The most common names like confused.com. or elvis.com have been taken long ago and are proberly never going to come up for new registration again. So where does this leave you, if you’re looking for a domain?  

Did you know that here are 900 possible combinations for two letter sequences. But if you’re looking for “IT” then you just won’t find it!  Even allowing for digits, again every single web address is taken for .com Of course, that’s ignoring the fact that .com registrars now mandate a 3-character minimum length, so it wouldn’t be an option. Its well worth checking out what domain availability there is for the NZ TLD (top level domain) by buying and “land-banking” you could get yourself a really nice future investment.

Other ways to make great domain names
Many of the three-letter sequences are taken. Adding digits to a domain name creates a number of garbage domain entries. If you’re dying to acquire great domains and unique domain names, they’ll free up sometimes only to be auctioned off through unique domain name sales.  

Basically, the longer the domain name that you choose, the more that the possibilities are that it could be available presuming that you’re willing to accept an arbitrary sequence of letters and/or digits. For example, most organizations have 3 and 4 letter acronyms so you may have a chance using over 4 letters to get the domain name that you want in acronym style!

The best advice, we feel is to obtain a domain name that closely resembles who you are about which gives you and identity and brand on the internet.

Have you you recommended or endorsed an I.T. product on your tech blog…?

The FTC wants To confirm: Bloggers “Probably” Won’t Get stumped $11,000 for fines. You may have heard, that recently the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has upset a lot of bloggers and opend up a huge can of worms.

The agency this week announced new guidelines that require bloggers and celebrities to make it known when they receive payments for endorsing products!

Can you imagine how some companies feel about that? It made a lot of people very anxious especially those that are launching new I.T. Products that get huge amounts of publicity through the blogosphere.  But that part was not controversial — though the guidelines had lots of questions on what that meant and who was a blogger. What really made people mad was the the fact that if you were caught endorsing a product and had not labelled it a paid advert; your any violation of the new guidelines could cost bloggers up to $11,000 per incident!

Since this time it looks like there is a re-think from the FTC on how they are going to manage this situation they have created. Apparantly if you endorse products through your blog you’re going to get a warning from the FTC about this unless you clearly label if you did or did not recieve remuneration for your review.

But how would the federal trade commision stop bloggers who operate on .com domains that do not live in the United States? And what of people that endorse US products that again host their blogs off US soil. It sounds like a huge can of worms…now then.. what were we going to blog about how about McAfee.com and its virus scanner.