LinkMoney.org

I have several old Blogs in Google Blogger under various subjects. They are well known, firmly entrenched and are my major traffic generators for the fields they are in. I use Feedblitz to handle the subscribers on them.

If you use Feedblitz as an email subscription handler, then you probably received an email similar to the excerpted parts below.

Hello, (yaddy yaddy…)

Custom domains are fully functional micro-sites that make life simpler for your subscribers by simplifying access to your newsletters and (, yaddy yaddy…) To make things even easier, we have reserved the following domains for you (these default reservations expire Aug 10, 2008, 23:59:59 EDT, which is why I’m writing to you now.)

(Entered here are various versions of your website’s partial url, the main keyword from your website, your email name, etc. all with the dot feedblitz.com extension.)

(For instance, but not offered for this website because I do not use Feedblitz on this one, eg: linkmoney.feedblitz.com and richhill.feedblitz.com.)

For under a buck a month per domain you get branded pages, simplified access and brand security. Even if you do nothing else, we recommend buying the domain for your main blog. Go to www.feedblitz.com/ (, yaddy yaddy…) now to see the reservations we’ve made on your behalf and activate the ones you want before they expire.

(Inserted here is a warning that someone else might gobble this up and become your competition.)

Thanks,

Phil Hollows,
Founder,
FeedBlitz, LLC.

————

Does any of that smack of extortion to you?

Actually I don’t see anything to worry about, because this same sort of thing will be happening with all of the new TLDs that are coming out in a year or so, this just sort of caught me off guard and I was upset to see the samples shown, with my own hard earned domain names in them.

Oh and when you click on the sample it takes you to a demo site that does not say anything at all about the dot feedblitz extension, it just plain says something like “Welcome to LinkMoney!” (Again, used as an example, not actual.)

I bet that email will piss more people off than Phil ever expected.

LOL

Shoemoney posted a blog yesterday about the new TLD .ME to become available on Thursday July 17, 200 at 8:00am Pacific time. I knew that this was going to be happening soon but had not paid much attention to it.

So after a lot of discussion in the comments section of Shoemoney Blog, I got hooked.
http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/07/16/me-landrush-starts-8am-pst-tomorrow/#comment-77594

Last night I made a hot list of about a hundred domains that I thought would be really really cool, knowing full well that I would not be buying more that two or three, but Hey I can dream can’t I?

Well naturally even with all best plans to lurk over the keyboard with my finger poised watching the second hand just like on an Ebay snipe, I totally forgot about it. LOL

So about noon Eastern time I signed on to GoDaddy and sure enough the dot ME was being sold. So I started down my list, SOLD, SOLD, SOLD, SOLD, etc, etc. You get the idea. Then lo and behold I got one! Then another, then another! What a shock. I’m not going to brag about what they are yet because some of the discussion on Shoemoney was that if domains had multiple requests, they would go in a bidding war.

I don’t know if that bidding war stuff is real or not, I can’t find anything in the fine print, and I did get a receipt and then a confirmation email. Incidentally I used the coupon (gdp0422v - Save 20% off $75 or more.) It saved me over twenty bucks.

You pay $19.99 per year with a two year minimum, so it isn’t exactly a bargain domain name.

What do you think about this new domain name .ME? It is the country domain name for Montenegero, but anyone may purchase one, as far as I know. We reported in a previous post on this Blog about ICANN opening up possibilities for any TLD name that you want. Read about the ICANN Paris announcement on a previous Link Money dot org post.

Can you think of some good .ME names? As I understand it there are no two letter names available, but I did snag a good three letter one.

Would you take a gamble on a dot ME domain name? It might tie up your money for a while and then if the scuttlebut is any where near true, you might even lose it after you have made the purchase. In that case I guess GoDaddy would likely have many millions of dollars in their interest bearing accounts before they have to issue a refund.

Let us know what your thoughts are on the .ME domains.

(Click on comments below.)

Read more on this dot ME Fiasco on another Link Money dot org post.