Today is live auction day at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Down Under conference in Australia. In fact the first event of the day (it is Thursday morning here at the show venue) will be Aftermarket.com's premier auction that gets underway at 8:30am local time (that is 5:30pm Eastern time Wednesday in the U.S.). RickLatona.com's auction crew will then take over for a 12 noon sale (9pm U.S. Eastern time Wednesday). We actually got a nice little auction appetizer last night when a live charity auction to benefit the Internet Commerce Association was held during a gala dinner. Here's a scene from that event:

The ten-name auction wound up producing over $18,000 for the ICA, the non-profit domain industry trade association. The top sales were BodybuildingProducts.com at $5,200 (purchased by T.R.A..F.F.I.C. Co-Founder Howard Neu) and MovingCosts.com at $5,000 (purchased by Darren Cleveland of the Recall Media Group). Both of those domains were donated by show organizers Fabulous.com. Howard Hoffman of PPCIncome.com was also very active in the auction. In addition to donating a name that sold for $1,000 (FreeRangeFoods.com), Hoffman purchased two domains. The sale was run by a talented young Australian auctioneer, Chris Norris, who will also conduct the Aftermarket.com and Rick Latona.com auctions today.

The Wednesday schedule featured four seminars on topics ranging from Acquiring Domains and Web Development to Monetization Alternatives and Asset Sales. I'll have details on those in our comprehensive show review article that will be published late next week after I return to the U.S. I do however want to give you a little preview to build some suspense. The photo below was shown by one of the panelists (a well known and much loved figure within the industry) during his presentation. It was snapped during the final leg of his roundabout journey from the U.S. to Australia. While traveling by car from Sydney to the Gold Coast, nature called and the moment happened to be caught on camera. Other than the strategically placed happy face, this is not a doctored photo. Can you guess who this is? We'll reveal all in our upcoming show review article - not that you will want to have anything else revealed after seeing this! I guess the takeaway on this is that as brilliant as our fellow domain traveler is, he is sometimes prone to read a little too much into things he sees.

Soon after the much appreciated comic relief, Graeme Wood, the Australian founder of travel giant Wotif.com, delivered an interesting keynote address on the building of his groundbreaking company and the selection of its unusual domain name. They were originally after WhatIf.com but, despite going as far as hiring a private detective, they were unable to locate the owner of that domain and wound up improvising with great success. The rest, as they say as history. We'll have more on Wood's talk in our upcoming review article.

The Wednesday schedule closed with a delightful dinner and wildly funny show staged by Australian comic/magician Matt Hollywood. Hollywood used audience members in many of his bits including one that involved dressing up and  "shrinking" Thought Convergence COO Ammar Kubba with hilarious results (see photo below):

Once he was suitably attired, Kubba was put through a dance routine that can't really be described in words. I did notice Fabulous.com had a video camera rolling at the back of the room so I have a feeling the performance will eventually surface on YouTube where it should be a runaway hit. Kubba is always a great sport and Hollywood certainly picked the right guy to make this routine shine and bring the curtain down on a night that sent everyone back to their rooms with a smile on their face.

Now, its back down to the conference floor for me (as I write this the opening live auction is only an hour away). I'll have another update from Australia for you tomorrow when I will recount Thursday's highlights from T.R.A.F.F.IC. Down Under.
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Greetings from Australia where the second business day of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Down Under conference will be getting underway at about 6pm U.S. Eastern time today (which is 9am Wednesday here on the Gold Coast where the show is being held at the Sheraton Mirage 

The first day of activity at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Down Under conference on Australia's Gold Coast is winding down as I write this. The time here at the Sheraton Mirage Resort is 10:30pm Monday night, which is 7:30 Monday morning back at our home base in Tampa, Florida where it is 15 hours earlier than it is here on the beautiful Queensland coastline. Coincidentally Queensland shares a nickname with our home state of Florida - both are known as the Sunshine State and that is printed on the auto license tags here. This was a special pre-show fun day (no business) that gave attendees a chance to try their hand at paintball, go kart racing and zorbing.

Domainers at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Down Under waiting to try their hand at Zorbing - which involves two people squeezing into a giant water filled ball after which they are pushed down a steep hill. Yeah - that sounds like something domainers would do!

Scene from the welcoming cocktail party at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Down Under Monday night 
(Monday morning in the U.S.) on Australia's Gold Coast.

The Sheraton Mirage is a spectacularly beautiful ocean front resort. It was getting dark when I arrived but I will get some photos of the facility during the week to show you what I mean.  The party was still going on when I retired to my room to post this and get some sleep after spending the past 36 hours traveling. 

The show officially opens for business tomorrow and runs through Thursday with another special activity day scheduled after the show Friday. I'll have a daily post in this column with highlights from each day's events and a more comprehensive show review a few days after we return to Florida next week.
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This is shaping up to be an unusual weekend as I will spend ALL of it flying. I will be leaving  for Australia Saturday afternoon (U.S. EST) and, because I will be crossing the International 

Also today we want to send our congratulations out to Oversee.net's Jeff Kupietzky who has just been promoted from Executive Vice President to President of the company. As most of you know Oversee is the parent company of DomainSponsor, Moniker and SnapNames and also stages the annual DOMAINfest Global conference in Hollywood, California. Oversee co-founder Lawrence Ng, who was featured in our March 2008 Cover Story, had been serving as President but will now concentrate on his duties as Chairman of the Board and Kupietzky will also join the board.

With the decline in PPC revenue we continue to see more and more domain owners developing at least a few of their names into websites (development will also be the primary theme at the DOMAINfest Global conference in January). In the past 24 hours I've gotten word from no

Ari Goldberger and Larry Fischer took a more traditional approach with their impressive new site at InsuranceQuote.com. Larry tells me this is just the first of many ecommerce sites he and Ari will be launching on premier generic domain names.

Andrew Allemann, who already has a developed domain news site at DomainNameWire.com, is also branching out with his new RegistrarJudge.com site. The site lets visitors review and rate the various domain registrars. I can see this service being especially helpful to industry newcomers looking for peer guidance on where they should register their domains. 

As Australian PPC expert Michael Gilmour pointed out in our new Cover Story, it is hard to develop more than a handful of really good sites. However, even  though development is not the kind of scalable solution for large portfolio owners that parking is, just one successful site could create a new revenue stream with the potential to more than offset the current decline in PPC revenues. 
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The 2006 brouhaha was triggered when veteran domainer and long-time ICANN watcher (and Business Constituency member) George Kirikos spotted dangerous language in the proposed  .biz/.info/.org contracts and sounded the alarm. Now, in contracts that are being proposed for the new gTLDs that ICANN plans to start rolling out next year, Kirikos has again found a variable pricing trojan horse lurking in the contract language. If it slips through, all of the existing registries could again be in danger of being infected with the same virus. Kirikos first called attention to the new problem with a post at Circle ID October 24 and he has since brought it to the domain community's attention with forum threads detailing the issues at DNForum.com and DomainState.com. 

It seems like domain owners are facing threats and challenges on every side these days, from the Snowe Bill (which, though derailed this year, is expected to reappear in new clothes next year) to the Kentucky government trying to claim the right to confiscate domain names. Another hot button issue is registrars competing with their own customers in the expired domain market, or in some cases (as with registrar Tucows.com's new YummyNames sales site), refusing to compete - instead sidestepping the entire competitive drop process and just keeping domains that expire at their registrar for themselves and selling them to the highest bigger. In conflict of interest scenarios like this, registrars have an incentive to make sure their customers do not renew their domain names. 

With the general economy in complete disarray nearly all of the "experts" are predicting a dismal Christmas season for retailers - with one exception, and I bet most of you will guess 

Dell went on to delineate the reasons why online merchants continue to gain ground despite the current recession: "Rising financial anxiety and tight credit availability are making holiday shopping this year an exercise in self restraint, and the web offers a quick, clean shot at purchasing 24 hours a day. Moreover, with websites like FatWallet and SlickDeals featuring bargain basement prices, hunting around for the best value is a convenient mouse click away. That's an easier proposition for many than slogging to the mall and fighting traffic, crowds and parking problems."

When I think of holiday shopping at brick and mortar stores now, the same old adage keeps coming to mind - "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." To quote The Who's Pete Townshend, I "won't get fooled again."

SEO is Dead? Writing on his LearnToDuck.com blog today (I love that name!), Lijit Networks Business Development Director Micah Baldwin said “If you do SEO for a living, you will be out of 

"If you are a company who employs an agency to provide Search Engine Marketing expertise, fire them. First, take the principles of search engine optimization (write focused content and use clean code) and have them distributed among the important personnel (development, marketing, sales, etc.). Make SEO organic, integral and integrated into your organization. Don't “do” SEO. Dont make it a separate function. Make tracking it part of your marketing effort."

"Second, select a CMS (content management system) framework (I recommend WordPress – it works great for even non-blogs!), that supports solid SEO principles. With WordPress, install two plugins: All-In-One SEO and XML sitemaps. That's it for SEO."

With so much bad financial news swirling around (including reports that online advertising revenue growth is starting to slow down as the recession takes hold) we wanted to send you into the weekend with some positive information to reflect on. 

At the start of the Interview, Smith asked Apprendi how the current slowdown compares to the last big downturn during the 2000 tech bust (when the dot com bubble also burst). Apprendi said, "When I was running ad sales at 24/7 in 2000, the rug was really pulled out from under us relatively quickly when the bubble burst. But there is a major difference between end of 2001 vs. 2008 going into 2009. Display media in aggregate is a core component of every marketer's strategy, including Fortune 1000 brand advertisers, not just the low-hanging fruit of direct marketers. So instead of it being the first to get cut as experimental media as it was back then, today it (online) is the core measurable media."

"In fact, we still believe that even though there will be a downturn in the ad economy, when people rebudget they are going to rebudget towards measurable media. There is a big difference from eight years ago in terms of the mindset of marketers who now have a tried and true media channel that works," Apprendi said. Apprendi went on to make many other salient points that should make you weekend a little brighter. 

The Internet Commerce Association has posted a response to a press release issued yesterday by the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) that erroneously 

There is a good reason that cybersquatting is a civil matter and not a crime. It involves a dispute between two parties about intellectual property, a protected mark. Trademark protection does not provide exclusive use of a mark in every class of commerce. Protection is even limited by geographic region in some cases. Therefore, there are many opportunities for dispute about who has rights to a mark in any given use. There are many famous marks that have multiple uses and multiple owners. This is how Olympic can be used for the famous international athletic competition that the world enjoys and also for Olympic Airlines, Olympic Arms and Olympic Paint. In fact, Olympic Paint owns Olympic.com and it is not a cybersquatter against other legitimate users of the Olympic mark. Trademark owners are already provided with two highly effective methods for dealing with the trademark abuse known as cybersquatting – the Uniform Dispute Resolution Process (UDRP) administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and national laws such as the U.S. Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). Both these avenues balance the rights of trademark owners against the legitimate interests and considerable investments of domain name investors and developers.  

Cybersquatting is a problem that negatively impacts many businesses. Trademark owners, advertisers and domain name investors and developers alike are hurt by this abusive practice and many domain service providers employ notice and takedown complaint programs to assist trademark owners in protecting their rights. The Internet Commerce Association has adopted a Code of Conduct that prohibits intentional trademark infringement, has supported actions now being undertaken by ICANN to end abusive domain name “tasting” that facilitates cybersquatting, and will continue to support policy and legislation that effectively curbs cybersquatting and protects the rights of domain name investors and developers. However, we should all be careful to not overextend law enforcement by suggesting that it should be involved in resolving trademark disputes.
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Our free monthly newsletter is being email to opt-in subscribers today but we think it is one that everyone will want to read (it is also available online here). The newsletter contains our

latest quarterly analysis of domain sales data to see how the the domain aftermarket is holding up in the face of the financial meltdown in the general economy. We compare the recently completed third quarter of this year vs. the same quarter of last year as well as Year to Date results for 2008 (Quarters 1-3) vs. the same time frame in 2007. The results may surprise you! 

The newsletter also features more details (and new photos) from domain industry giants Dr. Chris Hartnett and Dr. Kevin Ham recounting their experiences at the Harvard Business School where they just completed the rigorous and internationally acclaimed Harvard Advanced Management Program.

Elsewhere, NameMedia has announced a free webinar November 19th on the subject of “SEO for Small Businesses.” NameMedia’s own SEO Expert Christine Smith will give an in depth look at how everyday business owners and operators can improve their Search Engine Optimization. Some of the things you can learn in the 30-minute interactive presentation include:

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We were happy to hear from GeoDomainer.com administrator Steven Morales today.  If you are a fan of the geodomain social community site you know that it has been offline for the past couple of weeks. In addition, Steven's blog about the geodomain industry at 

SimplyGeo.com had not been updated since early October. As a result, we started receiving emails from concerned readers wondering if he was OK, a concern compounded by their knowledge that Morales is on active duty with the U.S. Army.  

I contacted Steven's partner, Skip Hoagland, to find out what was happening and learned that Morales was on a military mission that had prevented even Hoagland from reaching him. Skip finally got a message to Morales and Steven in turn got back to me to let me know that was fine and to fill me in on what has been going on. The mission has kept him offline for most of the past month and while he was away a technical issue that he is still trying to resolve took down the GeoDomainer.com site. While that issue is being resolved, Morales let me know that you can reach the site though an alternate URL: 

Steve Morales
GeoDomainer.com/SimplyGeo.com

http://www.geodomainer.ning.com. Morales is getting back into the saddle now and should be a regular fixture on the domain news circuit again soon. 

Elsewhere, Sedo.com has announced they will conduct an exclusive dotMobi Auction, beginning tomorrow (November 5th) at 12 Noon (U.S. Eastern time) and ending November 12th at approximately Noon EST. The domains up for bid include bank.mobi, cellphones.mobi and computer.mobi, to name just a few. You can check out the full auction inventory here. More auction details are also available here.  

Domain industry veteran and security expert Ram Mohan has been selecte