I received an e-mail with the promising title: “Offer for your domain EDUXY .ORG”.

A few years ago, I had registered that domain name because I wanted to launch a site about low-cost (possibly open source) educational software. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to work on that project because of other obligations, but I certainly had no plans to sell the domain. Still, the e-mail sounded… let’s say: intriguing.

It read:

We are interested to buy your domain name EDUXY .ORG and offer to buy it from you for 75% of the appraised market value.

As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

fleos.com

sedo.com

If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

We appreciate your business,

Yours truly,

Steven Harris

Now, it’s hard to say what the “market value” of a domain like eduxy.org would be –on the one hand, it is relatively short and quite “brandable”, IMO; on the other hand, it is a .org, not a .com, and not a “generic” term (like “education”).

Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that the domain would be worth around $2,000. That would mean that Mr. Harris would be willing to pay around $1,500 for a domain I wasn’t actively using –tempting, no?!

The e-mail also mentioned the use of an escrow service, which somewhat alleviated my fears of not receiving any payment after I had transferred the domain.

What, then, was the catch? There didn’t seem to be one…

The only thing I had to do was to get an appraisal from one of the “leading appraisal companies” mentioned.

Hang on.

Anyone who knows anything about “domaining” has heard of Sedo, a company that helps you buy and sell domain names, lets you “park” your domains to monetize them, and offers domain name appraisals for $29 per domain.

But what about “Fleos”?

That “company” has a rather amateurish web site that takes forever to load. (I won’t link to it for reasons that will become apparent in a minute.)

Once you select the “Purchase” tab, you’ll get a list of their “Domain Appraisal Prices”; they start at $22.99 for a single domain.

The site also features an “Industry Leading Guarantee”: if you can’t sell the domain for the appraised price within 6 months, Fleos will either refund the appraisal fee or buy the domain from you.

Sound too good to be true? That’s because it is.

If you look at their Whois data, you’ll see that the domain was registered on July 4th, 2009 –less than a month ago… (And oh, yeah, it uses a Whois protection service to hide the name of the owner.)

So this is how the scam works: they contact unsuspecting domain owners, offering to buy the domain name for 75% of its appraised value. However, they will only accept appraisals from two sites; one of them is undoubtedly owned by them, and it charges $6 less than the alternative site.

They’re hoping that domain owners will either pick the less expensive appraisal service, or get an appraisal from both services (and offer the higher appaised market value as “evidence”, of course).

What happens next? Nothing, I suspect.

I would be very surprised if people hear back from Mr. Harris after they have sent him their freshly-ordered market value appraisals –especially since he uses one of those Gmail addresses that sometimes can be, you know, hard to get through to…

]]> http://www.lockergnome.com/dutch/2009/07/30/domain-name-appraisal-scam/feed/ http://www.lockergnome.com/dutch/2008/05/24/for-your-info-how-google-almost-gave-me-a-heart-attack/ http://www.lockergnome.com/dutch/2008/05/24/for-your-info-how-google-almost-gave-me-a-heart-attack/#comments Sat, 24 May 2008 11:05:47 +0000 Marcel Feenstra http://www.lockergnome.com/dutch/2008/05/24/for-your-info-how-google-almost-gave-me-a-heart-attack/ Yesterday, I almost had a heart attack –and it was all Google’s fault.

Several years ago, I started to create a collection of web sites, aimed at “beginners”, about a variety of topics: from “lenen” (loans) and “hypotheek” (mortgage) to “schaken” (chess) and “sudoku“; from “Spanje” (Spain) and “Frankrijk” (France) to “bloemen” (flowers) and “DVD“. At the time of writing, almost fifty sites have been created; in a few years’ time, I hope there will be more than one hundred.

Being a cheap, eh, frugal kind of person, I’ve hosted all these sites on a single domain: voorbeginners.info (as you may suspect, “voor beginners” means “for beginners”). I own “voorbeginners.com” as well, but I decided to use the .info TLD for two reasons. First, I also have a (much smaller) collection of sites in English, hosted at forbeginners.info, and for that domain, I do not own the corresponding .com; and second, if the .info TLD was ever “appropriate”, I thought it would be for these informational sites!

Over time, the sites started to rank well for a number of search terms –until yesterday.

I rarely look at the statistics for my sites (currently, most of them don’t even carry advertising, so there’s no real reason for me to “obsess” over web stats), but I happened to be talking to a friend on the phone about one of the sites. Just for fun, I googled its main search term –only to find that it was no longer on the first page of the results. Or the second. Or the third.

At that point, I did decide to take a closer look at the stats –and what I found nearly made my heart stop: almost all of my traffic had disappeared overnight… (You should know that, in The Netherlands, Google has a market share of about 90%; Yahoo, MSN and a few local players are responsible for the remaining 10%.)

So I started to look up one term after another that used to be in the top 30 (or even top 10) of the search results, and found that my sites had completely vanished; they weren’t even in the top 100…

Had I received some sort of penalty? But why? I was, well, almost 100% certain that I hadn’t used any “shady” tactics to promote my sites; for example, I hadn’t even engaged in reciprocal linking… If it wasn’t a penalty, could a “competitor” somehow have sabotaged my rankings?

I decided to send an e-mail to Google, using an old address that had worked several years ago. Within minutes, I received an autoreply, instructing me to use the form located at a particular URL to contact Google instead. Fine, except… there was no contact form at that URL!

I was starting to despair now. If my rankings were gone and I had no way of contacting Google about it, what was I to do?

Fortunately, I had one final “bright” idea: find out if I was the only person who was having this problem. And sure enough, when I turned to WebMasterWorld, I found a new thread called “My 300 Keywords stopped working and traffic is 0” –that sounded pretty much like the problem I was having!

If you read that thread, you’ll see that several people had a similar problem yesterday, and the one thing they had in common was that their sites were hosted on a .info domain…

I suspect that Google made a slight programming error. They probably wanted to “filter out” a subset of the .info domains, but somehow forgot to add the appropriate conditions, and as a result, they ended up removing all .info domains.

Fortunately, this affected so many webmasters that Google was bound to find out about the problem pretty quickly –and indeed, within 24 hours the situation has gone back to “normal”, my sites rank where they used to and traffic is around the previous level.

Still, this “incident” had me thinking about my dependence on Google –an issue that Aaron Wall has written about repeatedly in his SEO Book Blog, but that’s actually even worse here in The Netherlands, because of Google’s near-monopoly in the Dutch market… Even if you believe (as I do) that Google is usually “fair”, a minor SNAFU can wipe out your traffic, and there is no way to contact Google about it! Solutions, anyone?

Finally, why had .info domains been singled out? It may have something to do with the TLD’s low price. Registrars like GoDaddy regularly charge $0.99 for the first year’s registration of a .info domain, versus $9.99 for most other TLDs. This, of course, makes .info domains very appealing to people who need thousands of domains and/or who only need the domains “briefly” –people better known as spammers…

Filtering out all .info domains just because some of these domains are being abused is, of course, far too draconian a measure, and I don’t think it’s what Google intended. It would make much more sense if they filtered out, say, .info domains that had been registered less than a year ago and that didn’t have some minimum number of “trusted” backlinks.

Oh well… Perhaps Murphy’s Law even applies to the GooglePlex!

I bought the version with a 24 inch screen (nice if you want to have several windows open at the same time), a 2.4 GHz CPU (IMO, the 16% performance increase of a 2.8 GHz did not justify the additional 240 euro), a 500 GB hard disk (just in case), and… just 1 GB of RAM.

Now, that doesn’t seem to make sense, does it? If you plan to run virtual machines with “foreign” operating systems on top of the “native” Mac OS X, you should really consider buying at least 2 GB of RAM, but preferably more. (Especially if you want to get decent performance from Vista in a VM!)

So why didn’t I order 4 GB? Actually, I did –just not from Apple.

In the Dutch Apple store, upgrading your iMac’s internal memory from 1 GB to 2 GB costs an additional 140 euro; upgrading it to 4 GB costs a whopping 800 euro…

That just did not sound right, and when I checked a few alternative sources (using Kingston’s handy tool to find the correct memory type), I found that I could buy a 4 GB memory kit for less than 80 euro!

So I ordered the memory from a third party and spent about 5 minutes installing it.

I am extremely happy with my iMac, it is a gorgeous computer and it runs just beautifully –but I find it strange (and somewhat disturbing) that Apple charges such an extreme mark-up for something that seems to be just a commodity… Is Apple taking advantage of its customers’ ignorance?

How about one of the following:

How the Grinch Stole Christmas
The Nightmare Before Christmas
White Christmas
A Charlie Brown Christmas
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

Or perhaps one of these:

Black Christmas
The Muppet Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol
All I Want for Christmas
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol

Or one of the following fine films:

The Night Before Christmas
Pluto’s Christmas Tree
Premier Noël
Chasing Christmas
Father Christmas

I bet you hadn’t heard of many of these –and yet, I’ve only just begun…

How many titles do you think the IMDb lists when you search for “Christmas”? (No cheating!)

The correct answer, at the time of writing, is: close to 1,100 (including shows made for television).

I know of no other holiday that has inspired so many movies. Do the same search for “Easter”, and you get less than 100 results. Birthday? Less than 300. New Year? Not even 50.

What is it about Christmas that makes it so special to filmmakers? (Theoretically, you’d expect “birthday” and “new year” to have more “universal” appeal, since they’re not “limited” to a Christian audience!)

I think it’s because Christmas is somehow “similar” to movies –it’s a day that makes us think about how (and who) we want to be, rather than how we are. Just like movies can make us forget our daily chores for a moment, Christmas allows us to look beyond reality, and to see a world of ideals.

Unfortunately, far too quickly, the movie has ended, the day after Christmas has arrived –time for us to go and exchange our presents…

Happy Holidays!

I’ve “discovered” LinkedIn only recently, and if you visit the LinkedIn profile for Marcel Feenstra, you’ll notice that, so far, I’ve mainly used it to get back in touch with some of my old classmates from Fletcher and Tuck.

That has certainly been a pleasant experience for me, yet I can’t help but think that LinkedIn, in its present form, hasn’t reached its full potential. There is relatively little “action” going on compared to a competitor like Facebook, and while LinkedIn could certainly create some of the “missing functionality” itself, I think it is a wise idea to empower its user community by means of an API.

One reason would obviously be that LinkedIn’s corporate development team could probably only work on a few dozen applications at a time, whereas thousands of community members could build apps simultaneously.

But more importantly, community members will likely feel a greater sense of ownership for applications that have been created by the community itself –if only because its members know best which “features” are most useful and most needed.

Many of the Facebook applications are “nice to have”: games, jokes, etc.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, would benefit most from “need to have” applications that concentrate on the business requirements of its users. The company should give developers an incentive to create such apps by having them share in the resulting revenues.

So let’s put on our thinking caps: what kinds of applications would make LinkedIn a more useful place for the members of its community?

In the past, SIDN policy has been rather restrictive. For example, a “regular” Dutch domain name could only be registered by companies, not by private citizens. In other words, it was by all means possible for my one-man company AfterImage to register the domain name “afterimage.nl” (as well as any other name that was still available), but as private citizen Marcel Feenstra I was unable to register “marcelfeenstra.nl”…

The idea was that the same name was often used by more than one person (John Smith, anyone?), and it was somehow “unfair” to allocate the associated domain name based on the principle “First come, first served”. Therefore, SIDN introduced the concept of the “personal domain”: three semi-random digits, followed by “.nl” and preceded by the person’s name; e.g., I could have been the lucky owner of “marcelfeenstra.713.nl”. For some reason, personal domains never took off in The Netherlands…

However, because of these personal domains, SIDN felt that it was confusing, and therefore undesirable, to have “regular” domains that were entirely numerical –that is, up until today.

Starting next year, it will be possible to register domains consisting of digits and/or hyphens –so people can create “vanity domains” that show when they were born or got married, say, or that match their telephone numbers.

I do not think that the new domains will be a success, and here’s why. In my site Domeinnaam voor beginners (in Dutch, sorry), I explain how the Internet system uses “IP addresses” for its underlying addressing needs. An IP address is actually a number, normally represented by four groups of digits, separated by periods, e.g. “209.200.52.199″.

Unfortunately, these numbers are a little hard to remember, so we use “domain names” –for example, “lockergnome.com” instead of the IP address I just mentioned! (Actually, using something called “host headers”, it is also possible for domain names to share IP addresses, but that is beyond the scope of this article.)

There may be a few cases where numerical domain names make sense (e.g., “112.nl” –112 is the Dutch equivalent of the American 911 emergency phone number), but I find it hard to imagine that anyone would ever use, say, ”20920052199.nl” or “209-200-52-199.nl”.

In general, numerical domains simply look like a step back to me –and I don’t believe that the days of the Internet are numbered.

Apparently, some of that content is produced by the unpaid interns of companies like Privila (that will get no link love from me). Interns, who commit to 150 hours of work, are expected to write at least 50 articles; so that’s a maximum of three hours per article, including research. If we ignore the wonderful world of unpaid internships and assume that you should probably pay around $5 to $10 per hour to hire a student, the cost per article should be somewhere between $15 and $30.

So, what’s the quality of these articles? It turns out that they are not very good. According to Richard Clayton, a security researcher at Cambridge University who received an e-mail asking him to link to an MFA site from his own website, “There were spelling mistakes, ridiculous bits of grammar, words missing from sentences and so forth.”

If you think that an implied cost of $15 to $30 for a student-written article is rather low (even if the article isn’t very good), think again. On various sites, freelance writers from emerging countries like India and Pakistan offer their services at a rate of $5 to $7 per 500-word article. If you’d rather use authors from, say, the US or Canada, you’ll pay between $10 and $15 per article.

It would seem that it is very hard, if not impossible, to compete against this sort of “cheap content”. For example, I have a site called Lenen voor beginners that contains about twenty articles about different loan types, fiscal aspects, potential pitfalls, etcetera.

Let’s assume that I spent, on average, one hour to write each article. Based on their experience level, Dutch journalists earn somewhere between €50 and €90 ($70-$130) per hour. So my articles “cost” about $70 each, right?

Not quite. I happen to know a thing or two about loans: I invested about 40 hours in studying the official course (and passing the associated exam), which adds another two hours per article in “research” –so the “cost” of each article is actually closer to $200…

Needless to say, professionally written, useful content will only be able to compete against hastily written, clueless gibberish if search engines are somehow able to identify the latter as such. According to Internet expert Ben Edelman, the content used on many MFA sites “is not useful. The world would be better off if these pages didn’t exist.”

That sounds like a big responsibility for Google with its motto Don’t be evil…

First, the Internet made it extremely easy for writers –talented or otherwise– to get published; then AdSense provided them with a simple way to monetize their words.

But what if your desire for Money is far more developed than your creative ability –what if you couldn’t write a coherent sentence if your life depended on it? Why, in that case you can always rip off a few people who were foolish enough to… put texts online.

It has happened to me on many occasions (and if you’ve published more than just a handful of articles, it has likely happened to you).

Sometimes, I find “snippets” of my work on Made For Adsense (MFA) sites that claim “fair use” to stay out of copyright trouble. Sometimes, the culprits don’t even bother to pretend, e.g. in the case of Lenen voor beginners and Autoverzekering voor beginners, two Dutch sites (about financial topics) that have been copied verbatim on more than one occasion. But invariably, I’m greatly upset when I find that my words have been used without my permission.

I certainly don’t claim to be the World’s Greatest Living Author; but if you want to make some money with words, go write your own!

Some of it will deal with (information) technology –hardly surprising since I’ve worked in IT for more than 25 years. (Hmm… That kinda shows my age, doesn’t it?)

On other occasions, I will write about news events or political developments that interest me.

And occasionally I will post more personal stuff, little things that irritate or excite me.

Since I am Dutch, and have lived in the Netherlands for most of my life (apart from a three-year stint in the U.S. while I did a dual master’s degree program at The Fletcher School and The Tuck School), I may sometimes have “a Dutch perspective” on things.

E.g., if I should ever talk about “football”, I probably mean “soccer” rather than the NFL (not that I will talk about football very often), and I may sometimes use a Dutch website or two to illustrate a point –I hope that’s OK.

A long, long time ago I read a few e-books by Chris Pirillo about this new “Internet” thing… Quite a lot has happened since, and I’m absolutely delighted that Chris has now given me the opportunity to express myself on Lockergnome!