Quidsi acquired Soap.com earlier this year; set to launch new site.

Earlier this year Quidsi, the parent company of Daipers.com, acquired the domain name Soap.com. It looks like it’s getting ready to launch a new site or brand and is sending out a teaser to the press.

Given the success Diapers.com has had with its flagship web site, it makes sense that the company would pick another great category-killer domain for its next brand. Of course, it could just be a brand and not a completely new store.

Soap.com was owned by Atlanta, Georgia-based Hill Manufacturing Co, Inc until earlier this year. On January 13 the domain name was transferred to Quidsi. The company used whois privacy from Network Solutions on the domain, but privacy doesn’t block the name of the owner.

Diapers.com started by selling only diapers, but then expanded into other baby products. It will be interesting to see what it decides to do with this domain.

Frank Schilling to sell at an auction, but not his domain names.

Auction house Christie’s is getting set to auction off some of Frank Schilling’s gems. 31 of them, to be exact.

But these aren’t domain names. They’re watches.

According to a profile on Christie’s web site:

In the world of watches, it is the ultimate luxury: not one or two watches, but an entire collection of timepieces. In the world of collector Frank Schilling, this luxury is a reality. This June, we present an impeccably curated group of 31 watches from the jet-setting businessman’s private collection. Steeped in both quality and quantity, Schilling’s collection represents a true connoisseur’s dream – a different watch for every day of the month.

A different watch for every day of the month. Not bad.

So Schilling will auction off his watches. Just don’t ask him to do the same with his domain name portfolio.

Why in the world would you handicap your company like this?

So I’m reading this story about ShopSocial.ly today and I’m scratching my head. The new social shopping web site is branding itself as ShopSocial.ly rather than ShopSocially.

Thankfully, the company has the domain name ShopSocially.com, which it then forwards to ShopSocial.ly. But this is still a big mistake. The company is relying on the Libyan country code to base its entire business. All of the SEO and all of the hosting points to a .ly country code domain name.

Perhaps this will give the company a leg up when someone in Libya searches for social shopping?

Surely this move isn’t to save people from typing three extra letters (com) on the URL. It must be trying to be “cute” and piggyback on web 2.0 naming conventions.

But if I were looking to invest in this company, the fact that its foundation is the Libya ccTLD would be one of my number one risk factors. One policy change and they could lose it overnight. (Yes, same thing for Bit.ly.)

New TLDs are top budget item — but also the only line item to decrease.

If you’re reading this blog, you are probably one of the many people that funds ICANN’s operations. You pay the registrar, which in turn pays ICANN and the registry. The registry also pays ICANN. In short, without domain registrants, ICANN has very little money.

So how ICANN spends its money should be important to you. The non-profit has released its draft proposed 2011 financial year budget for July 2010 to June 2011 and is currently accepting comments.

The 2011 budget includes a record $60 million in operating expenses. Here’s a breakdown of the budget items over $5 million:

1. New TLDs and IDNs – $8.048 million (the only budget item to go down from 2010 to 2011, $6.683 is for new TLDs and the rest is for IDNs)
2. Security, Stability, and Resiliency $7.087 million
3. Global engagement and increasing international participation $6.792 million
4. Policy development support $6.421 million
6. Constituency support $6.216 million
7. IANA function and technology operations improvements $5.804 million
8. Core meeting logistics $5.255 million

Targeted a specific country? Get your ccTLD.

It’s no secret that Google uses several factors to determine where a web site is “located” and thus determine its relevance to each individual searcher. But there has been a lot of debate about which factors are most important.

The two I hear mostly commonly are if the domain has a particular country code domain name and where the web host is.

Now Google search-spam czar Matt Cutts has laid it out on the table.

One person asked a question that we forgot to make a video for: “Can you list in order of importance the things that make a site to be seen by google as a site from a particular country?” Since we didn’t make it as a video, here’s the answer as a quick bonus:
1. country code TLD (ccTLD) such as .de or .fr
2. geotargeting in the webmaster console
3. IP address

There may be other signals, but those are the biggies and the order that I’d put them in.

What those “other signals” are is unclear. Perhaps the whois information matters. But Cutt’s response verifies that the most important thing in determining what country your web site is in is the country code top level domain name. Many people also know that IDNs are good for targeted a specific language.