Your Macs, iPods And iPhones Are Now Being Targeted
11 posts on the front page of Domaining.com are reporting the sale of Property.com.
Not here! I have a Mac trend instead!
One of the main draws for Macs is the sense of security that you have in that malware is designed for Windows. Combine that with the halo effect (iPod, iPhone) and you have about 8% of computer users on macs.
And they’re just going on with their malware-free happy lives.
Not so fast.
You see, these people who were fed up with the viruses and spyware on their PCs moved on to Macs. Only… it was their OWN computing habits that got them the malware. It was their downloading of p0rn and pirated software. It was their not having a firewall or anti-virus software. It was their not running anti-malware or anti-spyware software. It was their own fault for not taking preventative action and being reckless of the tubes.
Virus programmers realize this and are starting to target Macs because the users are easy victims. For example, a Mac trojan came out in June and is capable of doing everything a PC trojan can do, such as stealing passwords and opening firewalls. So are the Mac’s OS’s really more secure than Windows? Or is it that no one really paid attention until fairly recently?
So here we are in the third week of July and Apple STILL has not fixed the security issue.
But that’s not all! Your iPods and iPhones are vulnerable too! With the ever increasing popularity of these two gadgets, the probability of malware grows higher.
Don’t worry though, just visit your favorite Mac site that focuses on security issues like malware. Oh noes!! Where the hell are you going to find one?
There’s your opportunity.
With Macs being targeted and the vulnerabilities of the iPod and iPhone, now is the time to prepare for it. Sites will need to be built to provide Mac users with the proper downloads and content on how to protect themselves from malware.
You can build them yourself, or sell them some domain names.
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CNN Money’s Top 100 Places To Live And Why Dickinson.com Sucks As A Geodomain
CNN Money has posted their top 100 best places to live in the U.S. This is an indispensable article for the geodomainer. Not only is it a wealth of information, CNN Money exposes and reinforces the trends to make them stronger.
How do they decide what the best places are? Affordable housing, leisure activities, cultural options, job growth, crime rate, sunniness and health care among others. A good set of qualities to judge a city on. Perhaps not perfect- I’m a stormy weather kind of fella, not sunny- but I think it’s in line with the common perception.
Lets take the top city: Middleton, Wisconsin. Obviously they’re doing something right to place at the top of the list. Even so, now that CNN Money has labeled them the best place to live, you can bet everything on their tourism and real estate industries increasing… by a lot. If you lived near the top city, wouldn’t you want to check it out if you haven’t already done so? I would.
The absolute best part is that these city’s .coms can most likely be acquired at bargain prices. I’m curious to see how much Dickinson.com will go for at Bido’s auction. One of the selling points I’ve seen for this domain is the size of the city Dickinson, Texas. I work just 10 miles from Dickinson, Texas and can tell you that you do NOT want to use this as a geodomain. The place is a hole. The entire area is a hole. I’ll take any of the below cities over Dickinson.com as a geodomain.
Stick with Dickinson as a surname.
Back to the list! You can sort towns in many different ways here. Want to buy a .com of a city with high household incomes? Not a problem. How about a geodomain that focuses on the health industry? Sort by health care access. This list is great!
Here are some great ways to sort this list:
- Top-earning towns
- Hottest towns
- Priciest homes
- Most singles
- Youngest
- Job growth
- Affordable housing
- Plentiful leisure activities
- Plentiful cultural options
- Sunny weather
- Short commute time
- Good health care access
- Skinniest
- Clean Air
And, here are the top 10 places to live in the U.S.:
- Middleton, Wisconsin
- Hanover, New Hampshire
- Louisville, Colorado
- Lake Mary, Florida
- Claremont, California
- Papillion, Nebraska
- Milton, Massachusetts
- Chaska, Minnesota
- Nether Providence, Pennsylvania
- Suwanee, Georgia
Want a geodomain that would be great for a social network for singles?
- State College, Pennsylvania
- Durham, New Hampshire
- Amherst Center, Massachusetts
- Storrs, Connecticut
- Oxford, Ohio
- Stanford, California
- East Lansing, Michigan
- Indiana, Pennsylvania
- Blacksburg, Virginia
- Geneseo, New York
Notice something? They’re all college towns. Stanford, Miami U, UConn, Penn State and Michigan State are great schools and would be perfect to focus a geodomain on.
If you’re a geodomainer, this is a great tool for informing yourself before you buy. Boomark it!
EDIT:
This is the 2007 list. You can find the 2008 list here. And here is the post explaining my blunder.
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Tools Can Help Geodomainers Make Informed Decisions When Buying Domain Names
NOTE:
This was slated to be published tomorrow. But I had to push it up because I just ran into a Forbes post on the front page of Digg, and it basically made the same claims I did.
You can view it here.
I guess you can say I was on the right track if Forbes is thinking the same thing I am. Or the other way around. Our lists are almost identical.
ORIGINAL POST:
I found a nifty little tool that could help you determine what geodomains to buy when it comes to large scale wind and solar power. Think gigantic farms.
FirstLook is an interactive map (registration required for interactiveness) that displays the monthly average of wind speed and the intensity of solar radiation of a selected area within the U.S. When companies look to build these giant farms, they will seek out the absolute best locations to do this. FirstLook allows you to research possible locations and purchase reports that will tell you whether the locations you selected would be worth investing in.
Where do they get this information from? Well, it will be easier to send you to what they say about their wind and solar information sources.
This info isn’t exactly surprising as it’s common knowledge which states are windy and which are sunny. But you may be surprised to see just how windy or how sunny some of them really are.
The following two states are overwhelming choices to plop down a solar farm:
- Arizona
- New Mexico
While these would also be great choices:
- Nevada
- Utah
- California
- Wyoming
- West Texas
In the cold:
- Michigan
- Ohio
- Pennsylvania
- Wisconsin
- New York
- Maine
- Vermont
- New Hampshire
- Massachusetts
- Rhode Island
- Connecticut
- West Virginia
- Minnesota
- New Jersey
- Delaware
These states would be wise choices if you were to pump $10 billion into a wind farm:
- North Dakota
- South Dakota
- Nebraska
- Kansas
- Oklahoma
- Montana
- Wyoming
- Texas
- Iowa
Now, again on a massive scale, these states would prove to be duds:
- Georgia
- South Carolina
- North Carolina
- Virginia
- Alabama
- Mississippi
- Louisiana
- Delaware
What does this mean? It means that it’s a sure bet that Arizona would be one of the most likely spots for companies to invest in or build solar farms. So ArizonaSolarFarm(s).com (available before I just registered it) would be much more valuable and lower risk than MinnesotaSolarFarm(s).com (available…).
With the population density being the lowest in states like Wyoming, North and South Dakota, these states are just screaming to be loaded up with giant wind turbines. And just like with solar power, WyomingWindFarm(s).com would be a better choice than AlabamaWindFarm(s).com.
In the end, this is a nice little tool to help select geodomains. But by no means should you use this as your sole reason to buy these geodomains. You need to throw in a little common sense. Popular states like California and Florida are still great choices due to the population and money involved in those states. So even though each of them rank low when it comes to wind power, I would still snatch them up anyways. But DelawareWindFarm.com? No thanks.
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How To Use Freshdrop.net To Find Domain Names Part 1: Trends
I want to go more in depth on one of the tools I have listed on my domain name tools page. This post grew too large so I’ll be splitting it up into two parts.
FreshDrop.net is one of my favorite domaining tools. FreshDrop pulls feeds of expired/deleted domain names from TDNAM, Sedo, Afternic, Pool, Namejet, Snapnames and Tucows and lists them in a highly searchable/filterable database. The eBay feed is useless as it has a hard time reading the actual domain due to the way people use spaces when they type it in on the listings (It will read “trend domaining.com” as both “trend.com” and “domaining.com”).
The TDNAM, Sedo and Afternic feeds are free while the others require a pay registration. Today I want to concentrate on TDNAM, which is listed as both ‘Closeout’ and ‘Exp Names.’
‘Exp Names’ is the second to last stage before a name completely disappears. These are auctions starting at (usually) $10. If you are the only bidder when this stage of the name ends, you will receive the name for $10 plus registration fee. Of course, good domains are often found in this stage and the price can get much higher than $10. Don’t bid on a name until minutes before the auction ends. Bids are nothing more than a “Hey look here I’m a good name” sign.
‘Closeouts’ are names that get zero bids in the ‘Exp Names’ list and are always buy it now for $5 plus reg fee. This is your last chance to get these domains before they go poof. After they go poof you can freely register them anywhere, but you want to buy them here so you can keep their original registration date.
Using the filtering tool on the right of the page, we can narrow down exactly what we are looking for. A few days ago I wrote about the emerging trend of bamboo. Today I’ll use this keyword as an example on how to mine for great domain names.
The top section of the filtering tool lets you to filter out extensions you don’t want.
Section 2 lets you search by pagerank (and whether or not the PR is fake), age of domain and auction time left (day).
Section 3 is for your keyword and is self-explanatory.
Section 4 lets you exclude hyphenated domains, domains with numbers and domains that have www at the beginning as a typo (www.wwwtrenddomaining.com).
Section 5 lets you set a limit on the number of characters in a domain.
For this example, I set the filter as shown here on the right.
Doing a filtered search on the Closeout domains only gives us one name.
(A description of the columns can be found here.)
BambooWonderland.com isn’t a bad name. In fact, you could turn this into a site completely dedicated to bamboo products of all kinds. It’s a year old already, something that may help with the search engines. The word wonderland gives a euphoric feel to the word bamboo, something that emphasizes the green/organic trend you would be trying to capitalize on. And for $5 you could buy it now (well, after a couple days grace period).
Switching over to the Exp Names, we get a much larger list to work with:
I sorted this by age. A quick look shows that three domain names already have bids, again these are acting as a “Look at me!” sign: HongKongBamboo.com, BambooFuels.com and BambooExchange.com. HongKong could be good, as bamboo is already big in China and a site with this name could appear as an authority on bamboo (and it’s already 4 years old to boot). Fuel is a buzzword right now, though I’m not sure it works in this case as there is no bamboo fuel. Exchange, on the other hand, is a great keyword in this instance. This domain would be great for a buy/sell/trade site of all things bamboo.
Of the other names, I particularly like BambooLinks.com and BambooCarpentry.com. The former is obvious, but the latter would be great since bamboo flooring is already popular in the U.S. and furniture and cabinets should not be far behind.
These TDNAM names may not be top-of-the-line premium domains. But there are so many that expire every day that some do indeed slip through the cracks. At any given moment, there are more than 70,000 names in Closeout and 200,000 in Exp Names. There are domain names for almost any niche here. This is a prime place for buying names to develop or to flip. Many people buy closeout names for $15 ($5 plus reg fee) and flip them for $30 or $40. That’s 100% profit. Take it.
In part 2 I’ll go into how Freshdrop.net is one of the best tools for Geodomainers. View part 2 here.
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The Greatest Plant In The World Is Ready To Change Everything
There is a perfect storm brewing. The Green movement is in full gear; companies are looking for ways to display how environmentally friendly they, and their products, are. They are also looking for ways to offset the rising fuel costs. Couple these with the fastest growing multi-use plant in the world and you can expect a huge change.
The plant is bamboo. Consider these facts (pulled from Wikipedia and various other sources):
- Is the fastest growing plant in the world, growing three to four feet a day with spurts as high as one to two feet in one hour. This allows it to be harvested as wood in 1-5 years, as opposed to 40 years for oak.
- Can grow in almost any climate.
- The shoots are edible, healthy, and are widely used in Asian cuisine (and are also crafted into utensils).
- Fiber is made into paper in China.
- Releases 35% more oxygen into the atmosphere than most hardwood trees.
- Every part of the plant can be used for something.
- Requires no fertilizer, pesticides or herbicides.
- In Asia, it is used as a source of potassium and to directly treat infections.
- When treated, forms a lightweight durable board. This wood is used to craft everything from furniture to bridges, flooring, boats, skateboards and musical instruments with a million uses in between.
- Fiber is used to make yarn and fabric. Due to the soft nature, it is often crafted into clothing and bed sheets.
If I told you that these facts belong to the easiest growing plant in the world, you would likely reply with “Why the hell isn’t everything made out of bamboo then!?”
Good question.
After doing some Googling, I really can’t find reasons why we don’t use bamboo. The only negative I can find is that it is hard to control from spreading. Not just in your yard and neighbors yard, but it can begin to grow under your house and pavement too. Ouch.
But why is that stopping us from using bamboo? Bamboo isn’t something you’d place in your own garden next to tomatoes, carrots and lettuce. This would be used as a mass resource by manufacturers. It would be grown in miles upon square miles of fields.
In the end I still can not find a reason why the U.S. has not hogtied bamboo. I think it’s only a matter of time before it will.
Sooner rather than later too.
Bamboo isn’t the only multi-use plant in town though. Sorghum is becoming chic in the housing industry as well. Though it’s just a grass commonly used in foods, what companies are finding is that a byproduct can be used to make beautiful trendy wood such as Kerei boards. They are turning waste into a valuable product. Now that’s a powerful sentence any company would love to claim.
A third, more familiar, resource you can throw into this trend is wheat. Yes, wheat. It’s being turned into a ‘strawboard‘ used in building luxury furniture.
Bamboo is a versatile product that domainers can tackle in two different ways: one large bamboo site covering all the products; or a series of smaller sites dedicated to different industries that bamboo can cover. Either way, keep an eye out for bamboo domains.
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