Obama, Clinton use domain names in political battle.

Politicans’ ineptness with domain names can be downright hilarious. But apparently presidential candidates are getting a bit more savvy this election season.

ABC news and Wired have discovered a number of domain names registered by Obama and Clinton to attack each other. Here’s one example from Wired:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign quietly registered VotingPresent.com and VotingPresent.org in early December. Though no websites have gone up on the domains (which were first reported by ABC News), it’s a fair bet the sites won’t be promoting election-themed Christmas gifts: “Voting present” refers to a parliamentary maneuver in the Illinois Legislature that allows a lawmaker to abstain from voting on a particular measure.

The obscure procedural move became national election news Thursday, when The New York Times ran a front-page story reporting that Clinton rival and former Illinois state senator Barack Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times in his eight years in the post, sometimes on key issues like abortion.

The Times story marks the zenith of a rhetorical arc Clinton launched Dec. 3, when she first slammed Obama’s non-votes in a speech in Iowa. We now know her campaign registered and squirreled away the domain names the next day — a move that signals candidates’ growing use of highly focused microsites to buff their own images and to throw mud at opponents, from a safe distance.

It’s encouraging that these campaigns are thinking about the strategy of registering multiple domain names are part of an overall strategy. Clinton’s campaign also has a microsite at AttackTimeline.com targeted at Obama’s campaigning.

Obama’s campaign is getting in on the action with DesperationWatch.com.

Reading beyond the headline of a domain sales thread can be challenging. Here’s a helpful guide.

Earlier this week I lamented about how 99% of the domains at domain forums aren’t worth anything. If you’re going to sort through the many names at forums in hopes of finding a winner, perhaps I can help you find your way. Below are common sales thread titles at popular domain forums, and what they really mean.

Domain Inventory Liquidation Sale
Translation: I just got a big credit card bill I can’t pay. Help me out. Buy some domains. Please?

Brandable Domains
Translation: I made up some words. You could make up some words and register them yourself, but I’m hoping you’ll pay me $50 to take mine.

Renewal Sale
Translation: I registered a bunch of domains 11 months ago. They don’t get any traffic. Looking back, these are bad names. Will you buy them from me so I can recover some of the cost? Otherwise I’ll let them expire.

Must Sell!
Translation: My wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend is getting on my case about this stupid domain hobby I have. I keep telling him/her that I’ll make money at it, and if I can sell a few of these domains then I’ll prove my point.

Must Sell! Selling all domains!
Translation: I sold a few domains for $15 each, and my wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend thinks I’m an idiot. I thought I could just register some domains and become a millionaire. You mean I have to work to make money at this? Forget it. I’m selling all my domains.

One Word Domains for Sale
Translation: Click this title and you’ll see a bunch of one word domains for sale. But it’s my portfolio of .ws domains.

One word .com domains for sale
Translation: One word .coms? Don’t get too excited. They are common words with a couple suffixes: consultingly.com, footballed.com, lawyerlying.com. You might also need a dictionary to figure out what the words mean.

Baseball .com for sale
Translation: Hah! Made you look! You didn’t notice how I put a space between baseball and .com, did you? Well, that’s because the domains are really Baseball4unow.com and Baseballiswaykewl.com.

Ovt+Ext domain for sale
Translation: I bought a few domains from some guy on the forum last month that have Ovt+Ext scores. I assumed they had traffic, but I haven’t gotten a single visitor. So I’m hoping you will buy them with the hopes that there’s traffic.

Ovt+Ext domain for sale
Translation: Man, I’m an idiot. I just bought a domain from that previous guy advertising that it has an “Ovt+Ext” score of 35. But it doesn’t get any traffic. I’m looking for the next sucker.

Traffic Domains for Sale
Translation: Trademark typos for sale.

Premium domains for sale
Translation: I bought these domains instead of new registrations, so they must be premium.

Hot! Wii [or other hot toy] domains!
Translation: [Company] just announced new [toy, game] and these domains will be hot! Selling WiiCheats.com, WiiStores.com, WiiHelp.com. Everyone else on this forum beat me to the others and is listing them for sale too. I’m trying to sell these before I get UDRPs in the mail.

Excellent domains at great prices.
Translation: I just registered these this morning.

A review of auctions won at first .mobi domain auction shows most are out of compliance.

When mTLD, the registry for .mobi domains, hooked up with Sedo to auction off premium domains, they probably had no idea how successful it would be. Successful, that is, in terms of sales prices. But there’s another side of the coin, and that is compliance with mTLD’s auction rules.

Participants in the auctions are bound by several rules, including:

The Website may initially consist of a dotMobi-compliant parking page; provided, however, that You agree to:

- Use Your best efforts to create, launch, and operate a live website related to and primarily containing content relevant to the commonly held and widely shared understanding of the meaning of the Domain Name to replace the parking page within six (6) months of the transfer of the Authorization Code by mTLD.

- Achieve and maintain a mobile readiness score of at least 4, as measured by the ready.mobi test then available at http://ready.mobi/.

When the winner* of the over $1M of domains at the most recent auction said he bought them solely for resale, it struck me as against the spirit of the auction. I went back and reviewed the top 25 sales of the first Sedo .mobi auction (held over 2 months ago) and found that only 4 of the domains were compliant. Below is a list of the 25 domains and how they resolve as of Tuesday afternoon:

Hosting.mobi does not resolve
Bank.mobi does not resolve
Download.mobi does not resolve
Currency.mobi does not resolve
Insurance.mobi does not resolve
Chat.mobi Prompts me to download chat.mobi
Traffic.mobi Prompts me to download traffic.mobi
Books.mobi Prompts me to download books.mobi
Free.mobi goes to network solutions parking page
Loans.mobi compliant parking page
Marketing.mobi does not resolve
Creditcard.mobi does not resolve
Rent.mobi compliant parking page
Creditcards.mobi does not resolve
Voip.mobi forwards to VOIPgate.com
Webcam.mobi does not resolve
DomainName.mobi does not resolve
DomainNames.mobi forwards to EUROdns.com
Advertising.mobi parked page
Downloads.mobi non-mobi compliant web page
Credit.mobi compliant parking page
Atm.mobi non-mobi compliant web page
Payment.mobi non-mobi compliant web page
Index.mobi non-mobi compliant web page
Cricket.mobi compliant parking page

Reselling a domain doesn’t absolve the original buyer of the requirements. They must make the buyer enter into the same agreement with mTLD.

The big question: will mTLD enforce the rules, or will they just count their cash?

*The auction has been voided and will be rerun in January.

New expiring domain auction launches at Afternic.

NameMedia, Inc. has started auctioning expiring domains via its Afternic platform. The auction service went live today.

Based on a preliminary check of 6 domains on the list, the company appears to have struck a deal with domain registrar Melbourne IT. According to RegistrarStats, Melbourne IT is the 5th largest domain registrar with 4.9 million domains under management.

Auction prices start at $60 and domains go to auction if at least one preorder is submitted.

The expired domain auction scene has gone through major changes lately, including eNom and Network Solutions setting up a service to compete with SnapNames. SnapNames had an exclusive relationship with the registrars. They used a change of ownership clause in their contract to back out after SnapNames was purchased by Oversee.net.

It was only a matter of time before one of the world’s largest domain name companies tossed its hat in the expired domain ring. Although the new expired domain auctions will be a great revenue source for Afternic, it will have another favorable byproduct: It will draw more attention to Afternic’s “closing soon” domains, which will help sellers get more money for their domains.

.Mobi registry voids latest Sedo auction, will re-run in January.

First, there was the euphoria from .mobi fans. The December .mobi auction at Sedo closed with major records: Music.mobi sold for $616,000 and Games.mobi sold for $401,500.

But then the griping began. Constantine Giorgio Roussos said he was the rightful winner of Music.mobi at $66,000. Sedo’s servers had slowed to a halt in the last few minutes of the auction, which kept many bidders at bay. Sedo extended the auction for 2 1/2 hours and the domain was bid up to $616,000. Worse, the self-proclaimed new winning bidder for these premium .mobi domains publicly stated that he bought them as an investment, not to develop. Technically, that can be construed as against the auction terms.

After an investigation as to why Sedo’s servers slowed to a halt, the .mobi registry has decided to void the entire results of the auction and rerun it in January. They are contractually allowed to do this.

Sedo’s investigation sheds new light on what happened:

-The server meltdown not only prevented bidders from placing new bids, but it kept valid proxy bids from being triggered

-The auction was “compromised”, according to Sedo. This likely means that someone performed a denial of service attack during the final few minutes of the auction. (This is my speculation based on Sedo’s official statement.)

The new auction will run on January 23, 2008, according to Sedo.

Unfortunately, this won’t make anyone — the original “winners” and the new “winners” happy. Sedo is between a rock and hard place.

The biggest winner in this decision might be Alvaro Albarracin, who gets to rethink his decision to shell out over a million bucks on highly speculative domains.