Leave a comment about whether you’re going to TRAFFIC next week.

One of my readers asked me to post this in advance of next week’s TRAFFIC show in New York City, with a goal of having those people attending the conference get a head start on networking. So if you’re going to the show, leave a comment with your real name and company association (if any).

If you’re not going to the show, feel free to leave a comment as well about the next show you’ll be attending.

I personally won’t be attending next week’s show, and will hit the circuit again starting in January with DomainFEST. If I were heading to NYC next week, I think the most interesting panel looks like the ad quality panel at 1:45 on Tuesday.

It will also be interesting to see how the two auction houses perform. This will be the last Moniker live domain auction during a TRAFFIC show. Rick Latona Auctions, which also has an auction at the show next week, will be the exclusive auction house next year (and is organizing most of the TRAFFIC shows).

Multiple bidding threads may cause confusion.

It sure seemed that there was a glitch in Sedo’s system.

I started receiving offers for one of my domains listed at Sedo — TaxiScreen.com — last week. The offers were small, and I countered with a reasonable asking price.

But something was weird. After the potential buyer offered a few hundred dollars, I received an email informing me that a bid had been received. I logged in to check it — and it only showed $134.

How could it go down? I emailed Sedo telling them there must be a bug in their system. But there isn’t. The issue is actually that two different parties were making offers on the domain at about the same time, so I actually had two bid threads open.

This is, of course, a good thing, so I sent the domain name to auction.

If you ever receive offers in a thread that don’t make sense, check the “offers received” section of your Sedo account to see if you’re dealing with more than one buyer.

Environmental awareness company busted for “glaring example” of reverse domain name hijacking.

A for profit eco awareness and fundraising company that associates itself with Al Gore has lost a domain name dispute and been charged with reverse domain name hijacking.

Live Earth, LLC, which organizes concerts, runs, and other events to raise money and awareness for environmental issues, filed an arbitration case with National Arbitration Forum to get the domain name LiveEarth.com. The company uses LiveEarth.org as its main web site.

But the company had no chance of winning. LiveEarth.com was registered in 1998, almost a decade before Live Earth, LLC started operating. The registrant of the .com also had clear rights or legitimate interests in the name, since he was part of a group called Live Earth Trust.

Live Earth, LLC attempted to purchase the domain name and offered $50,000, which the domain owner refused. Hence the arbitration filing.

In finding that Live Earth, LLC committed a “glaring example” of reverse domain name hijacking, the arbitration panel wrote:

In this case, evidence of Complainant’s bad faith use of the Policy abounds. With the benefit of counsel, Complainant initiated this proceeding based upon a common law claim to trademark rights that is tenuous at best. Moreover, Complainant’s filings have ignored the applicability of Policy paragraph 4(c)(ii), which makes it painfully obvious that Respondent has rights and legitimate interests in the disputed domain name by virtue of Respondent’s founding and operation of an organization with almost exactly the same name. Also, those filings have completely disregarded the fact that registration of the disputed domain name predated any claim to Complainant’s ownership of said trademark rights by about nine years, which makes it even more painfully obvious that the disputed domain name was not registered in bad faith relative to Complainant.

Critical customer mistakes often blamed on domain registrars.

When online backup service CrashPlan.com went down earlier this month, the company was quick to blame its domain name registrar GoDaddy. Code 42 Software, which runs the CrashPlan.com service, tweeted about how GoDaddy “mistakenly removed our root nameserver entry”, “inappropriately took over our DNS”, and did a DNS “hijack”.

What Code 42 Software never tweeted was that it had mistakenly let the domain name expire. The outage was Code 42′s fault, not GoDaddy’s.

None of the previous five e-mails GoDaddy sent to Code 42 Software alerting them to the impending expiration got the company’s attention.

The myth that GoDaddy was to blame then spread across the web. One commenter on an unrelated CNET story wrote that “GoDaddy somehow hosed their domain.” (Code 42 Software did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

Domain registrars frequently get thrown under the bus when one of their customers makes a mistake. In another case, a registrant of a popular web site had their non-Go Daddy email account compromised, which allowed an attacker to steal their domain name by transferring it away from GoDaddy. The customer publicly blamed GoDaddy, even though the problem was with the customer’s e-mail security.

GoDaddy deals with the brunt of attacks like this, given its massive size and mass market strategy. But other registrars feel the heat, too. Earlier this year fingers were pointed at eNom when several high value domain names were stolen. The real culprit? The customer used a weak password, allowing the thief to access their account.

Companies with popular web sites have a number of added tools they should use to protect against many of the most common domain problems. Moniker and Fabulous offer domain locking tools with added security. GoDaddy offers Protected Registration. Companies should also subscribe to DomainTools’ Registrant Alert to find out about potential theft quickly. The sidebar of this story has other tips for protecting your domain names.

The difficulty for domain registrars is how quickly misinformation spreads across the web. It doesn’t matter that it was Code 42′s fault that CrashPlan.com went down. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t the registrar’s fault that a domain was stolen. Just the accusation, combined with the viral nature of social media, can damage a registrar’s reputation.

Judge forces AOL to change venue.

Advertise.com 1, AOL 0.

Online advertising company Advertise.com has scored its first victory in its legal battles with AOL: a judge has ruled against AOL’s favored jurisdiction of the Eastern District Court of Virginia. AOL was forced to refile the case in California Central District Court, where Advertise.com is based.

Both companies sued each other back in August, after AOL blamed Advertise.com of trademark infringement of AOL’s Advertising.com brand. AOL is also claiming trademark rights to Ad.com, which derailed the $1.4M sale of that domain name.

Advertise.com released the following statement today:

In a lawsuit filed in August 2009, corporate giant America Online continues the dirty tactics long associated with big business by suing Advertise.com for its use of the generic word “advertise” in its designation and domain names.

Termed a battle between David & Goliath by the court itself, AOL seeks to monopolize the online advertising market and unfairly restrain its competitors by asserting extremely broad rights to words commonly used in our daily vernacular. AOL’s lawsuit is an attempt to unjustly overtake the entire online marketing space and if unopposed could likely lead to attacks on other competitors in the Internet advertising world.

Advertise.com won its first battle against latter-day Goliath on October 9, 2009, when it prevailed in a motion to dismiss based on venue in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. AOL purposely chose to bring the suit in Virginia, well-known for its exceedingly fast docket, even though the disputed action took place in California and AOL’s own headquarters are located in New York.

AOL failed when the court ruled in favor of Advertise.com and granted a transfer of venue. This was AOL’s underhanded and calculated scare tactic to keep Advertise.com off balance with mountains of paperwork and multiple legal threats in hopes it would give in to AOL’s unfounded demands.