Network Solutions was the only registrar for .com domains for a few years. You wanted a .com you had to go to them. And as always happens in a monopoly, you had to pay the asking price, no questions asked.
Amazingly Network Solutions to this day still asks for 35 dollars for a year’s worth of .com goodness.

A few years ago NetSol lost their monopoly and since then other huge players like GoDaddy and Enom fight for domain name market with cheap prices.
New domain registrations at NetSol dropped to almost nil but renewals are now the main source of income at NetSol. Business was slowly dieing until suddenly NetSol starts reserving thousands of new domain names every day.

Like all registrars Network Solution’s website has a search where potential domain buyers can check if their desired domain name is available.

Some bored exec must have realized that the data from those searches could be used to increase new domain registrations. The way he found to capitalize those searches was by using a loophole in registrar policy.

All registrars are allowed to reserve a domain for five days for free, which is a safeguard created to avoid possible payment issues by users.
In simple terms if some guy registers a domain name using a credit card, and a few days later his credit card is turned down the registrar can remove the reservation with no cost whatsoever.

So Network Solutions started reserving any name searched through their site effectively locking that domain name and stopping registration at any other registrar.

If you search for the availability of mypetiscuteandfluflybutbites.com at their site it will probably show as available. If you don’t buy it at that time NetSol will automatically reserve that domain name.

If one hour later you try to register that same domain name at GoDaddy it will show as unavailable and you can’t do it. But if you go back to NetSol’s website and try again they’ll happily let you register that domain for 35 bucks.

Any lawyer will tell you that’s extortion and I believe that bored exec is now packing his stuff and writing his resume. This is not a shot in the foot it’s a shot in the head.

Do you have an insane domain name that you would like Network Solutions to have? Go ahead and search for it pretty soon that domain will be working and displaying a under construction page.

Via TechCrunch

RSS feeds are the butter of the web 2.0 bread. The rss feed market is by nature a subset of the web but it’s getting bigger each day by the development of new ways to distribute content and media directly to the consumers.

I think it’s safe to say that half of the blogs and podcasts in existence today are consumed entirely via a RSS agreggator. And it’s now common for institutional websites to have some kind of blog too.

The initial wave of RSS clients was based on desktop apps. It took a couple of years for the next logical step, which was web based RSS aggregators.
For the latter part of the last decade our lifestyles have been changing to adapt to the mobile world. And web based rss aggregators fit perfectly in this new reality.
Bloglines was a major player in this revolutionary market until Google deployed it’s all mighty Google Reader and set web based rss reading as the new standard.

Apparently everybody forgot all about desktop based rss readers. At least until now when out of the blue Newsgator reminds us that desktop RSS readers are still alive, by releasing most of their product line for free.

This seems a desperate attempt at desperate times. And i really doubt that this move will dictate the return of desktop readers.

By the way do you still use a desktop based RSS reader? Why?

Hulu.com has opened it’s doors into beta for some time now. And it has been stirring quite a commotion on twitter and the blogsphere, just because it’s a legal way to watch TV series episodes for free at anytime on your computer. Which is nothing new.
It has been done for years now by downloading tv torrents which as you may now is illegal. Most people avoid downloading illegal stuff from the internet and i really understand that.

In my humble opinion i fail to see why downloading a tv show that was broadcasted for free on tv should be illegal. But it is, and there’s nothing i can say or do to change that.

But i think it won’t be long now until tv’s start broadcasting their shows for free with ads on the internet. Hulu just comes to show that it will happen. It’s just a matter of time now.

For all those people outside of the US where you can’t watch hulu your only option still is to download the shows illegally. It makes now sense, but that’s the way it is.

The music industry is collapsing. The consumers found a new way of getting the music they want, to listen to in which device they want. Itunes and others online services have changed that forever.

But there was no way to enjoy live music without getting out of your house and going to a concert.
Not anymore, now you can watch a live concert from your favorite band without leaving the comfort of your home.

And no, it’s not a live recorded CD or DVD. It’s a live broadcast which you pay to “attend” and get to watch your favorite performer playing live for you and hopefully to a few more costumers of the service.

DeepRockDrive promises just that. delivering live high quality video streams of selected bands perfoming in a stage set up just for that live broadcast. Actually the term that has been developed for such an event is a Socialcast.
And as you may have figured out the paying public gets to interact with the band in several ways.

According to TechCrunch’s post:

Here is how it works. The band plays in the soundstage (with or without a live audience). The shows are filmed with five Sony HD cameras, and each Web viewer can pick which camera angle he or she wants to watch. The audience can also vote on the order of the songs on the set list or make their own song requests. They can also send in messages during the show that the band sees on large screens surrounding the stage. Prior to shows (DeepRockDrive calls them socialcasts), bands try to drum up support with digital posters on their Websites and MySpace pages that fans can take and put on their own Web pages. On DeepRockDrive, fans can petition for concerts from their favorite bands, like this one for Flight of the Conchords. If the shows get enough votes, it makes it easier for the bands to decide to fly to Las Vegas to record the show.

I really don’t know what’s the big difference in watching a DVD recorded live or these kinds of socialcasts.
The big plus for this kind of stuff is the interaction between the audience and the performer.
On the other hand, the quality of such a service remains to be seen, but somehow i doubt that it will DVD quality.

Despite it’s possible shortcoming, it’s a step in the right direction. This service will debut during CES. So will surely hear more from this service very soon.