A trip to an automotive museum and House of Blues.

Social events for next year’s DOMAINfest Global event in Los Angeles will be held at differenct locations than years’ past.

The Wednesday dinner networking event will be at the Petersen Automotive Museum. The museum has a large collections of race cars, classic cars, hot rods, motorcycles, and celebrity cars.

After three years at the Playboy Mansion, the farewell party will move to the House of Blues. This is a smart change after last year’s illness outbreak at the mansion and what ensued.

There are only a few more days left to get early bird admission tickets for $995. The rate increases to $1,195 on October 1.

Domain up for auction gets solid traffic.

About a year ago the owners of Sex.co put the domain up for sale on Sedo and started parking it there, too. Now that the domain name is up for sale in next month’s TRAFFIC auction, I figured I’d check in on the domain to see what sort of traffic it gets.

According to the Sedo listing page, the site got about 10,800 visits over the past 31 days. Given the number of visits to the Sedo listing page you have to wonder if some of those visits are from other domainers.

Since Sex.com apparently gets 125,000 visitors a day, this equals about 0.03% of Sex.com’s traffic assuming Sex.com actually gets that much traffic.

What do you think Sex.co is worth?

Public Interest Registry asks for permission to allocate one and two character .org domain names.

.Org domain name registry Public Interest Registry is asking (pdf) ICANN to allow it to allocate certain one and two character .org domain names.

PIR’s contract with ICANN currently prohibits registering these short .org domain names. PIR wants to allocate any such domains excluding ones that correspond to a country code.

There’s a model for releasing these domains as ICANN has approved every request to date from other registries for similar plans. However, VeriSign abandoned its plan to do this for .net. .Org generally falls into the same category as .net and .com when it comes to being considered “sacred”. Should PIR’s allocation process be successful then we can expect VeriSign to consider restarting its plans.

Public Interest Registry wants to take a different approach to allocating these domain names than many other registries. It plans to auction them off using one or more domain name auction services. It will require bidders to be “committed to building out the domain name with a sound marketing and branding strategy, including a strong focus on quality, creativity and the desire to launch the site in a timely manner.”

Other registries have followed a three step process: allocate via an RFP process to entities willing to develop the domains, then auction of remaining domains, and finally release unsold domains on a first come, first served basis.

The PIR proposal strikes me as a bit odd. Instead of giving the first option to whomever has the best plan to develop the domains, it appears the company will sell the domains to whomever meets minimum criteria but is willing to pay the most.

Yes, Amazon.com owns KindleFire.com.

Amazon is rumored to be launching the Kindle Fire tablet and eReader on Wednesday. But a lot of people have asked, “what about the domain name?”

After all, the company owns a lot of other nature Kindle domains, such as KindleWave.com.

Domain Name Wire has confirmed with the previous owner of the domain name that he sold it to Amazon.com.

The New York resident who sold the domain name didn’t divulge any details, but the domain name went under whois privacy in early 2010. It remains that way today.

I’m not surprised that Amazon owns it. It has proven itself savvy about buying domain names and typos ahead of product launches.

Alas, it looks like someone just registered wwwKindleFire.com yesterday at Go Daddy.

Registrar has 50 million domains on the books. But how about over time?

This past weekend Go Daddy topped the 50 million domain name mark.

This number is kind of like a balance sheet: it means the company has 50 million domain names currently registered with it.

But what about the longer view? I asked Go Daddy for some indication of how many domains it has registered over time.

Since it became a registrar, Go Daddy has registered more than 225 million years worth of domain names.

A domain registered for one year and then dropped is worth one year, if it’s renewed for a year then it becomes two years.

Impressive numbers.