Find out what keywords people are using in domain registrations.

What terms did people register domain names for yesterday? Domize let’s you take a peak.

Domize’s domain registration statistics provide daily and monthly stats for domain registrations by TLD and term. For example, its June 30 report shows that .com picked up 27,145 net registrations while .mobi picked up 482. But perhaps the coolest feature is seeing what keywords people use in their registrations.

On June 30 the top terms appear to be related to Michael Jackson:

Term / Added / Deleted / Net Gain
1. jackson 1,175 103 1,072
2. michael 1,192 127 1,065
3. green 600 201 399
4. cash 516 172 344
5. online 1,208 896 312
6. home 736 456 280
7. life 558 284 274
8. auto 469 214 255
9. king 356 106 250
10. all 521 280 241
11. pop 283 46 237

Domize also shows the biggest losers. For June 30, the biggest losers (meaning more domains using the term expired than were registered) were domain names including ‘financial’, ‘asbestos’, and ‘lawyer’.

For a longer term perspective, Domize also has a 30 day report.

Domize tells me it has lots of statistic enhancements in the works.

Domain Roundtable hits the mark in Washington D.C.

The past week has been a whirlwind. I arrived in Washington D.C. a week ago Friday for Domain Roundtable. I didn’t rest until getting home Wednesday night. Here’s my take on the conference.

Attendance - I estimate 150-175 people attended this year’s Domain Roundtable conference. That’s in line with other conferences lately, but I think it would have been much higher if it weren’t for unfortunate timing. It was the last conference in a flurry of events this year, and came on the heels of TRAFFIC ccTLDs. It also concluded just days before ICANN’s Sydney meeting, and Domain Roundtable tends to attract many of the same people that go to ICANN meetings.

Panels - Thought Convergence, parent company of Domain Roundtable, knocked this one out of the park. I was on the first panel of the conference, which looked at what effect changing demographic and web user trends will have on domain names. From the moment I saw a preview of the panel’s questions, I knew this was going to be interesting. The questions were thought-provoking. I’ve never had to think so much about questions before speaking on a panel. All of the panel moderators threw out the standard, re-hashed questions and examined an unique angle on the industry.

Food - With attendance down from previous years, I assumed Thought Convergence would skimp on food. I was wrong. It was over-the-top. I say this even though I was spoiled with a fantastic dinner hosted by David and Michael Castello the Saturday before the event, and dinner at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant with the NameMedia team Monday evening. The event food was not standard hotel food to say the least.

Auction - There wasn’t a “real auctioneer”, which was somewhat of a disappointment. Technology problems also bogged down the auction a bit. But I think the results were good, headlined by the sale of Contests.com for $380,000.

People - As usual, Domain Roundtable attracted a good mix of industry professionals ranging from domainers to registries to policy wonks. There were a lot of faces that don’t usually make it out to these shows, including Mike Mann and Rob Monster. Mann hosted a pre-conference party at his part-time home in Bethesda.

My only regret about the conference was that I spent much of the time writing rather than meeting with even more people and attending all of the panels. Ron Jackson of DNJournal will have more comprehensive coverage of the conference on his site later today.

Epik releases new directory pages on city domain names.

When I met with Epik founder Rob Monster last week, he said the pace of development on Epik would be fast and furious. He wasn’t kidding. Within just a couple days, Epik has already launched an enhancement to location domain names on its network: directory pages.

Location domains originally only had the same type of content as other pages: a home page, related articles, pictures, and video. But now each one is populated with business listings for categories such as hotels, dining, florists, and recreation. This is sure to juice the search engines a bit as well as make the sites more useful to visitors.

If you have city domain names in any top level domain, consider submitting them to Epik. For an example, see Brookhaven.us. If you have long tail location names, such as VancouverDermatologist.com, I recommend submitting them to DevHub for now. DevHub does a great job getting this type of domain indexed.

Latona will add needed spark to domain conference franchise.

TRAFFIC was the first big domain name industry conference. It was also the first to do many innovative things, such as offer a compelling live domain auction. But lately its star has faded. Attendance is down, and don’t just blame the economy. When I asked people before the last TRAFFIC if they were going, a common response was “It’s not relevant anymore”. They blamed lackluster programming as a big fault. As TRAFFIC sputtered, other domain conferences such as Oversee.net’s DomainFest rose to stardom.

But adding Rick Latona to the bill is sure to add a spark. Here are 5 things Latona, Rick Schwartz, and Howard Neu can do to improve TRAFFIC, two of which have already been done.

1. Make it inclusive - Invitations? Banning people from attending? Latona has already said that’s out the window. It was immature and cast a negative light on the industry. Good riddance.

2. Lower the price - Again, Latona has already said this will happen. The irony here is that Schwartz has been opposed to dropping the price in the past because he felt the quality of attendee would drop. Latona has turned this on its head, saying that small time players can become big ones later. It’s a 180 from the old line of thinking.

3. Improve programming - Publish the agenda well ahead of time, get new speakers, and think up fresh panel topics. It sounds like next year’s shows will feature more themed topics. Much like the ccTLDs conference, new topics means learning something.

4. Don’t oversell it - This will be hard given that both Schwartz and Latona are the consummate salesmen. They’re both good at it, too. But you can only read “this is the most important conference ever” so many times before you start to call B.S.

5. Play nice - It puts a black mark on our industry when competitors try to boost their own position to the detriment of the industry. Don’t be scared of other conferences and when they take place. Work with them to pick the best time for all conferences to be held. Compete by providing a superior product, not by trying to shove our your competition with timing and dates.

A few domain news updates.

Here are a few domain news updates for Thursday evening.

Andrew Allemann on Bido - join me on Bido.com tomorrow at 1 PM EDT. I’ll be the guest in the chatroom as we auction off Basketballs.info.

Free domains for Fathers’ Day - Webfusion is giving away free .info domain names all weekend. The company will give away as many as 3,000 domain names. If you miss the freebies don’t worry — the company is charging just $.88 for .info through the end of the month.

.Pro wants lower fees - Registry Services Corporation (dba RegistryPro), which runs the .pro top level domain name, is requesting (pdf) that ICANN lower its annual fees. RegistryPro has been paying about $122,000 per year and wants to lower that to just $10,000 a year. The registry would also pay $.20 per domain registration or renewal once its registrations hit 50,000. Right now there are about 36,000 .pro domains registered.