.NZ Whois service deliberately broken

For some time the .nz whois service has been unreliable and for the last week or so I can use whois in the mornings before going to work but if I try to use it in the evenings I almost always get a "query_status: 440 Request Denied" response. I get this from the very first request.

Early effects of Expired Domains changes

Like many of their regular customers I've been monitoring Expired Domains' pricing and auction end time changes.

Negotiate not haggle

A few days back I received a simple query through NameDrive on one of my parked generic domains. "Are you interested in selling this domain name? If so can you please contact me" with an isp email address. That's not a lot of information & email is fairly inscrutable so I didn't have a clue why this person might me interested in the domain in question, and I knew I'd be negotiating blind.

Great British Domains

I've decided to explore the uk ccTLD address space a little. A lot more of the good domains are taken than for the New Zealand ccTLD, and with 80 million people that's hardly unexpected, but there's still unregistered gems to be found.

budgetfootwear.co.uk and ethnicmusic.co.uk are just two of the gems I've picked up. The rest are all listed at my future uk catalog site Great British Domains (Love that name.) I have the .com & .co.uk registered as well, I just don't want it indexed under those names till I've done something more readable.

Of course I'm inexperienced, I registered flatting.co.uk before I realised that they call it flatshare, but you live and learn.

And equally, a lot of work went into it over the last few days, but not very much to say about it for the moment. Never mind, as I learn I'll report back.

Onwards ...

New form of domain appraisal scam

I've just bought a couple of domains on the aftermarket: AppraisalScam.com & AppraisalScams.com and until I get around to building them properly have set them up as mini-sites on 1plus. While I was setting them up I saw some news items that alerted me to a new variation of the old appraisal scam.

The traditional appraisal scam works by scammers approaching a domain owner and offering a very good price for it. Negotiations continue for a while, and then the buyer "Needs" an appraisal to convince their boss, or for the bank manager, or some suitable excuse.

Domain Parking 101. Introduction.

What is Domain Parking?

At it's simplest, domain parking is a service where one person owns a domain name and a second person provides a very rudimentary website for that domain. Some registrars automatically park domains that aren't hosted elsewhere on a simple page on their servers.
Many years ago, that's all parking was. Then somebody worked out that there were a lot of page views on these essentially empty sites. Commerce abhors wasted resources and pretty soon many of the registrars that used to provide a boring standard page started to provide a page with adverts on it. This provided a nice revenue stream to the registrar.

New Zealand Domaineers Site

Long time NZ Domainer Garth Piesse has set up a forum in the NamePros vein, called Domain Talk.

It's early days yet and he's only got a handful of posters but it definitely seems to have potential.

Given how wrapped up in .com & .us the overseas domaineering fora are, having a New Zealand centric site is likely to be very useful.

I'll be watching, and contributing. Why not join me?