Domain Roundtable hits the mark in Washington D.C.

The past week has been a whirlwind. I arrived in Washington D.C. a week ago Friday for Domain Roundtable. I didn’t rest until getting home Wednesday night. Here’s my take on the conference.

Attendance – I estimate 150-175 people attended this year’s Domain Roundtable conference. That’s in line with other conferences lately, but I think it would have been much higher if it weren’t for unfortunate timing. It was the last conference in a flurry of events this year, and came on the heels of TRAFFIC ccTLDs. It also concluded just days before ICANN’s Sydney meeting, and Domain Roundtable tends to attract many of the same people that go to ICANN meetings.

Panels – Thought Convergence, parent company of Domain Roundtable, knocked this one out of the park. I was on the first panel of the conference, which looked at what effect changing demographic and web user trends will have on domain names. From the moment I saw a preview of the panel’s questions, I knew this was going to be interesting. The questions were thought-provoking. I’ve never had to think so much about questions before speaking on a panel. All of the panel moderators threw out the standard, re-hashed questions and examined an unique angle on the industry.

Food – With attendance down from previous years, I assumed Thought Convergence would skimp on food. I was wrong. It was over-the-top. I say this even though I was spoiled with a fantastic dinner hosted by David and Michael Castello the Saturday before the event, and dinner at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant with the NameMedia team Monday evening. The event food was not standard hotel food to say the least.

Auction – There wasn’t a “real auctioneer”, which was somewhat of a disappointment. Technology problems also bogged down the auction a bit. But I think the results were good, headlined by the sale of Contests.com for $380,000.

People – As usual, Domain Roundtable attracted a good mix of industry professionals ranging from domainers to registries to policy wonks. There were a lot of faces that don’t usually make it out to these shows, including Mike Mann and Rob Monster. Mann hosted a pre-conference party at his part-time home in Bethesda.

My only regret about the conference was that I spent much of the time writing rather than meeting with even more people and attending all of the panels. Ron Jackson of DNJournal will have more comprehensive coverage of the conference on his site later today.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Easy-to-build online stores provide alternative to standard domain name parking.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned SmartName Shops, a unique parking template available to SmartName customers. The system has been available for a while on SmartName, but is now available by request on NameMedia’s other parking platforms including ActiveAudience and Goldkey.

SmartName Shops are pay-per-click based templates that include an e-commerce product feed from Shopping.com. They provide a good alternative to standard parking pages on domains that have an e-commerce connotation. Even more important – SmartName makes them very easy to set up.

Creating a shop basically involves adding your domain name as usual, selecting an e-commerce template (one is available and another on the way soon), and choosing your category keywords. For example, I set up EverythingsDogs.com in about 3 minutes. The tabs at the top represent my keywords.

This example is basic and you can customize your shop fairly easily. SEO features are rich, allowing you to add custom text and change your meta tags. You can also upload a custom header. An example of a well developed Shop (owned by NameMedia) is YellowDress.com.

SmartName Shops provide a great alternative for domains that either don’t perform well as standard parked pages or lend themselves to an e-commerce site. Getting a SmartName account is very difficult, but users of ActiveAudience and Goldkey can contact their account manager to activate shops on those programs.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Epik releases new directory pages on city domain names.

When I met with Epik founder Rob Monster last week, he said the pace of development on Epik would be fast and furious. He wasn’t kidding. Within just a couple days, Epik has already launched an enhancement to location domain names on its network: directory pages.

Location domains originally only had the same type of content as other pages: a home page, related articles, pictures, and video. But now each one is populated with business listings for categories such as hotels, dining, florists, and recreation. This is sure to juice the search engines a bit as well as make the sites more useful to visitors.

If you have city domain names in any top level domain, consider submitting them to Epik. For an example, see Brookhaven.us. If you have long tail location names, such as VancouverDermatologist.com, I recommend submitting them to DevHub for now. DevHub does a great job getting this type of domain indexed.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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