Company to hold month long auction with just 50 domains.

Moniker is holding a premium domain name auction starting next month that will be limited to 50 top domains.

The auction will run for a full month beginning October 1820. Domain submissions are due by October 13.

The company is looking for good 1-2 word generic domain names or 1-4 character domains.

If Moniker does this right I think it could be a good opportunity for sellers. The company has had a solid year selling premium domain names that were originally listed in auctions. By focusing on just 50 domain names and letting them get exposure for a full month, it’s possible we’ll see some decent activity both in and out of the auction.

Of course the key ingredient will be good domains at good prices.

www. will make a comeback with new top level domain names.

Type in any correctly configured domain name and you don’t need to include www. Technically www is merely a subdomain.

That’s why you usually see ads that just promote something like DNW.com instead of www.DNW.com. People know it’s a web address because of the .com.

I started thinking about this today when I was dropping my daughter off at school. I was behind a truck that had a URL with www on it: www.somename.us.

Was it necessary to include www because many people don’t recognize somename.us as a web address?

(Keep in mind that you are likely in the top .01% of knowledge about domain names if you’re reading this site. Most people don’t understand domain names.)

As hundreds of new top level domain names come online over the next few years I think we’ll see a resurgence in the use of www when people display a web address. If you just saw a truck that had great.food on the side you might not think it’s a web address — much like I did a double take when seeing att.jobs on a billboard.

www.great.food? People get that. Well, they’re more likely to get that than great.food.

Why developing your domain names might be a bad idea.

From time to time I read excellent blog posts that explain aspects of domaining much better than I can.

Nat Cohen delivered yesterday with a post titled “The Dangers of Optimism -or- Don’t Develop“.

His point in a nutshell: just because you’re a good domainer or have good domains doesn’t mean you can build a web business.

It’s very true. They require very different skills. I’ve seen countless web business started by domainers fail, although many times they’re afraid to admit it.

I personally sunk over $20k into Lakeway.com, only to make critical design errors, underestimate the feet on the street sales effort required to sell listings on it, and rely too much on the promises of third parties to turn it into a viable business.

Other development efforts (such as this blog) have worked out well.

Does the problem lie with domainers? I think it has more to do with the false view that all web businesses are successful. I’m not sure that domainers are any more or less successful building web businesses than the typical person. The truth is that most web businesses fail.

Mobile domain reaches five year anniversary.

Five years ago yesterday .Mobi launched its landrush period, officially opening the doors to what would become a wild roller coaster for domain investors. Remember Flowers.mobi?

I quickly came full circle on .mobi. I remember meeting the .mobi team at DomainRoundtable in Seattle and thinking “Wow, this is a new domain extension that actually makes sense.”

But technology quickly caught up. Mobile web access became less “mobile specific” with the growing prevalence of smart phones.

In a blog post commemorating the anniversary, dotMobi acknowledges these changes but says .mobi continues to flourish:

But, despite all those radical changes on the mobile front, .mobi as a domain has continued to grow. There are now more than one million active registrations and .mobi is the sixth largest generic Top-Level Domain in the world (.com, .net..org. .info and .biz come before it.) There are now two-character domains like nv.mobi and 53.mobi. There are now .mobi sites covering the world, in every vertical. (And in South Africa, “.mobi” is synonymous with “mobile website,” e.g., “Our product needs a .mobi built before we launch.”)

I suspect a lot of new top level domains introduced in the coming years would love to have a million domain registrations.

Parking company touts benefits over DNS.

Domain parkers have only a few days left before the end of URL forwarding for Google parking. For most people that means switching to DNS parking. But there’s another option at some parking companies, including CNAME.

CNAME parking basically lets you point the web traffic for a domain to the parking servers. It’s how Google’s own Adsense for Domains self-serve product originally worked. It’s a bit more work the first time around, but Sedo says it have a few benefits in the future because you have an account-specific CNAME address:

1. Clarity on whether you still own the domains in your account to ensure a smooth selling process on the Sedo marketplace

2. An automated process of adding new domains to Sedo

3. The ability to still set your own MX entries and control the emails for your domains (available now)