Current trends can make for good domain registrations. Just not all of them.

I’m always baffled by the number of people that rush to register domains related to current (and horrific) events such as the Boston marathon bombings. First, it’s tasteless. Second, it’s not like they’re ever going to sell these domains, which presumably is their reason for registering them.

Yet there are current events that make it worth registering domains…

Soon U.S. online retailers of a certain size will be forced to collect and remit sales tax to the many jurisdictions across the country. Much like with payroll administration, most online businesses (especially small ones) will turn to third party companies to handle the calculations and payments.

Last week, as the internet sales tax bill was talked about more in press, people got busy registering relevant domains, such as FileStateSalesTax.com, InternetSalesTaxFiling.com, FileMySalesTaxes.com, and SalesTaxPayments.com.

True, those on the ball registered domains like these long ago. But last Monday there were 26 .com registrations including the term “salestax”. On Tuesday thee were 41. (These numbers are small compared to domains registered that relate to the Boston Bombings, I might add.)

These domains may have value some day. Even soon. Unlike domain names registered to capitalize on the death and dismemberment of others.

(Hat tip: Lean Domain Search)

Party moved back one night and becomes official sponsored event.

The WaterNight event to take place in Las Vegas during this month’s TRAFFIC show is now the conference’s official Thursday night party.

The event was going to be held on Wednesday night and open to everyone. The event was pushed back one evening and is now open to TRAFFIC attendees and non-domain industry supporters.

TRAFFIC organizers are donating $50 for each conference goer to attend the event and will provide the food. NameCheap is sponsoring the open bar.

The announcement of WaterNight, which benefits the non-profit Water School, set off a controversy with TRAFFIC organizers Rick Schwartz and Howard Neu, who were upset that domainers might attend the WaterNight event while not paying to attend TRAFFIC.

Changing the event to Thursday might be a classic win-win: TRAFFIC gets a good official party and the Water School raises money for its good cause.

You must register to attend WaterNight, and you are encouraged to also make your own $50 (or more) donation when you register. If you already registered and paid to attend before the change was made, I humbly request you to consider letting Water School keep your entry fee.

The world’s smallest active top level domain has seven second level domains.

ICANN recently published the latest batch of monthly registry reports, which include data on how many domains are registered in each (non-ccTLD) top level domain. The latest data was for the end of January.

There’s a lot of interesting data in these reports. What I find particularly interesting is looking at what I call “micro TLDs”. These are very small top level domains that are usually sponsored top level domains. Most have very restrictive registration policies that make it difficult to register domains. If the policies were looser, then these TLDs would have many more registrations — although that’s debatable for some of them.

Stumbling upon an active web site in these micro TLDs is rare. It reminds me of the game we played on car trips as children. You tried to spot all 50 state license plates. It was difficult to find an Alaska plate, and the rarest bird was Hawaii. When I find myself on an active .museum web site, it’s like the feeling of finding that elusive Hawaii plate.

Here are some of the micro top level domains. Numbers are as of the end of January.

.Aero – 8,327 domains

Billed as “the world’s first industry-based top level Internet domain”, this domain is solely for use by aviation companies. We’re about to see a lot more industry-based top level domains.

.Jobs – 6,586 domains*

Technically there were 42,597 registered .jobs domains at the end of January. But 36,011 were registered through a business deal to create a bunch of microsite job boards.

.Jobs is being liberated later this year, so you can expect many more registrations.

.Travel – 23,364 domains

Despite official restrictions on this domain, it is basically no longer restricted to travel companies.

.Post – 7 domains

Micro or mini-micro? This slow moving sTLD is only for members of the postal community. A recent news announcement from sponsor Universal Postal Union says that 30 counties have joined a steering committee for .post, but then says that only “several countries have registered for their own sponsored top-level domain name”.

The Universal Postal Union has filed community objections to all of the TLD applications for .mail, as well as a string confusion objection against Deutsche Post AG’s .epost application.

.Museum – 436 domains

Only museums, museums associations and museum professionals can register these domains. The domains are also available as internationalized domain names.

.Coop – 14,990

Designed just for co-ops, which is a larger category than you might think.

Submit a design at 99Designs.

I’m working on a redesign of Domain Name Wire, and part of that is a refreshed logo.

The logo is essentially unchanged since I started this site in 2005. I designed the original logo with a $50 do-it-yourself logo creator software package. What, you can’t tell?

A lot has happened since 2005, including the creation of crowd design sites like 99Designs. So I decided to ask lots of people for help designing the new logo by starting a logo design contest.

If you have design skills, check out the Domain Name Wire logo design contest at 99Designs.

If you don’t have design skills, I may call on your help to select the winning logo entry.

Vietnam sees rapid IDN registration growth.

There were 887,000 .vn internationalized domain names registered as of the end of March, Dot VN, Inc. disclosed this month.

Dot VN, Inc. markets Vietnam’s .vn namespace in an agreement with Vietnamese Internet Network Information Center.

Some (or perhaps most) of the success with IDNs is because Dot VN convinced VNNIC not to charge registration fees for IDN domains.

Dot VN provides free web site creation tools to owners of the IDNs. Over 30,700 sites used the tools as of the end of March, and the company projects to hit 53,000 sites by the end of the year.

The company plans to monetize the IDN domains using the web site creator by adding advertising to the sites, including ads from Google. The company projects it will earn $120,000 from the ads by the end of the year.

The company uses Google and Yahoo ads on its Info.vn site and now generates about $20,000 a month from the site.

All told, Dot VN hopes to generate $1.6 million in cash flows in 2014 to service its debt. That debt is high; it’s projected to reach $8.7 million in 2015.