.De auction traffic halts auction.

Massive traffic for Sedo’s .de “pre-auction” has taken the site down. A message on the site reads:

Due to the extremely high participation in the .De Pre-Auction Sedo?s website was temporarily down. We have decided to extend the auction until 8:00 PM CET. If necessary we will extend the auction later than this time to accommodate additional bids.

Presumably that means 8:00 PM ET. Actually they mean Central European Time, but don’t be surprised if this is extended.

Bidding has been fast and furious all morning. When I checked around 10 am, Com.de was leading the pack at over $100,000. In addition to releasing one and two character .de domains, .de registry DENIC is also releasing domains that include other top level domains, such as com.de and net.de.

The last time I recall Sedo melting under traffic was during a .mobi auction in 2007. Sedo retooled after that and has avoided any meltdowns until today.

We’ll keep you posted.

Respondent in domain dispute successful against rival online coffee retailer.

An Arkansas company has successfully defended a domain arbitration case brought against it by a rival online coffee retailer.

Discount Coffee.com Inc. filed an arbitration case against WCM Investments of Arkansas, which operates Coffee.org. WCM had registered the domain names discount-coffee.net, discountcoffee.net, and discountedcoffee.com to drive traffic to Coffee.org, and DiscountCoffee.com argued that WCM was trading on its goodwill by using the allegedly confusingly similar domain names. But it was unable to convince the arbitrator that the domains were registered in bad faith and that the respondent didn’t have rights or legitimate interests in them.

There’s an important lesson here for companies that use a generic domain name: it doesn’t give you rights to all variations of your name. That’s why it’s important to pick up your name in other top level domain names (and variants in .com) if you want to keep the competition from getting them. If only AOL’s Advertising.com understood that.

Domain company organizing online auction for charity.

Domain parking alternative WhyPark is hosting a charity domain name auction with a twist — the single highest bidder gets to pick which charity receives the proceeds.

The five day auction will run December 7th and end December 11th and contain about 50 domain names. When the auction is over, the one person who placed the highest winning bid across all auctions will get to choose the charity to receive the proceeds of all domains sold in the auction.

As an added incentive to submit domains to the auction, selected domains will include a logo and link back to whomever submitted the domain. WhyPark requests that people submit domains that they feel are worth at least $250-$500; not domains that you plan to let expire next time around.

Details and the submission form can be found at WhyPark.com/auction.

2009 has been rough for domainers, but put it in perspective.

I got an iPod this week. Yes, it’s my first iPod. I bought it because I got back into running and needed to get my own tunes rather than borrowing my wife’s iPod.

Since I plan to use it primarily for running, I initially considered getting the iPod Shuffle. But I liked the idea of the Touch as a portable video game player; kind of a throwback to my days growing up playing the GameBoy.

Touch vs. Shuffle. The Touch is so big, isn’t it? It’s clearly too big for running.

Then I put things in perspective. When I ran cross country in high school I would run with a Walkman. With a cassette player. After that, I graduated to an even larger Walkman with a CD player. (Remember these?)

The iPod Touch is 1/5 the depth of a cassette Walkman and a fraction of the size of a CD player. So when you put things in perspective, the Touch is minuscule, and there’s no reason you can’t go running with it.

Much like the size of an iPod, I think it’s smart to put 2009 in domaining in perspective. We’re all thinking about the glory years in domain parking. But how does now compared to, say, 2004? Are we better off today? The first five years I owned domain names I didn’t make a cent from them, because there wasn’t domain parking as we know it. For the first two web sites I built in the late 90s I had to get direct advertisers because there was no such thing as Google Adsense.

Compared to a decade ago, I’d say things are much better. Sometimes you just have to put things in perspective.

.De auction ends today.

Sedo’s one and two character .de domain name “pre-auction” ends at noon Eastern today. .De is the country code for Germany, and is arguably the most successful country code domain name on the web.

.De registry DENIC is releasing one and two character domains, as well as other domains that previously were not allowed to be registered (such as those containing only digits). It announced the change on October 15, leaving just a week for organizations to work on plans to acquire the domains as they become available on October 23.

Instead of auctioning the domains off, DENIC is releasing them on a first-come, first-served basis. That’s where Sedo comes in. The company, which is based in Germany, is holding an auction before the release of the domains. It has then teamed up with a number of registrars to try to grab the names that receive bids as they become available. If Sedo’s partner registrars are unsuccessful during the “drop”, Sedo will attempt to acquire the domain name in the secondary market on the high bidder’s behalf.

As of late last night, many domains had already crossed into the five figure (EUR) range in the auction.

Bidding is available here.