A Few Trends The November Elections Could Bring Into The Spotlight
Some have already speculated on how the Obama Administration will affect our domaining industry. Even a few domainers tackled this subject:
Mike over at The Domains
Steve over at SimplyGeo
There are others who have commented, but these are good reads if you want to do some trend domaining on our next four years.
I’ve also blogged about how the election of Obama will affect stem cell research and help coin the next big green term: carbon credit. The stem cell research I believe will receive the biggest boost of them all.
Today I want to go a little further on speculating how President Obama will affect our industry. But beyond that, there are some other trends that showed up unrelated to Obama.
Net Neutrality
Perhaps the biggest victory of them all is keeping the net neutral. Obama is strongly for net neutrality, making it a top priority in his first year and saying that
“a key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history.”
I don’t think people really understand this topic, especially republicans. The most puzzling thing of the entire election, to me, was this monstrous internet support for Ron Paul, a candidate against net neutrality! The internet addicts supported a candidate who wanted to destroy their addiction! Don’t get me wrong, net neutrality isn’t the most important issue of all. But I think it’s a hell of a lot more important than it’s been treated. And it’s a far lesser worry now.
College Football Playoff System
As soon as he said it on 60 Minutes, it was the talk of all news media. Obama would like to see an eight-team playoff series replace the bowl championship series we have now, much to the delight of millions of fans. And perhaps that’s all that’s needed to push this idea into a real possibility.
Not that it lacks it, but this would breathe new life into college football overall. And a playoff system would bring big money to the cities that host it.
Marijuana
Though not exactly related to Obama, research for medical marijuana is accelerating. And last month, several states took another step forward to what ultimately could be the legalization of marijuana on recreational level.
Michigan legalized medical marijuana this past November while Massachusetts decriminalized it. Now, I’d like to tell you exactly which states have legalized medical marijuana and which have decriminalized it, but that’s a fuzzy line. You see, each state has it’s own law and definition of “legalized.” Let’s just say about a dozen states have legalized medical marijuana and about a dozen have decriminalized it.
However, the fact remains that it’s a Schedule 1 drug, meaning it’s against the federal law anyways. There is movement to change this, however.
And I think it will be legalized. There is just too much money involved. And if you want a say in it, this may be your chance.
Czars
One of the big new keywords is Czar. The word isn’t used literally, but more as a slang for people in high authoritative positions. For instance, the Chief Technology Officer referred to in Mike’s post on The Domains would otherwise be known as the Tech Czar. Obama is considering creating a position for someone to oversee the U.S. auto industry. He would be known as the Car Czar.
Keep an eye out for the Pirate Czar, Climate Czar, Energy Czar and Cyber Czar. And expect this word to be attached to many other keywords.
Change you can conceive in
Oh yes, it’s true. People celebrated on November 4th with sex. Think I’m joking? Mainstream media have reported this fact everywhere. They are called Obama Babies. This could possibly get real big. First, August of next year will be the boom. If you have a baby or baby name site, put in a special Obama section now. Second, if it gets big enough to include any baby conceived during his entire presidency, it becomes the Obama Generation.
Green
I’ve blogged about many green technologies. The election of Obama strengthens these technologies. Everything from alternative energy such as wind and solar on a large scale, and on a small scale, to alternative materials such as bamboo and alternative transportation such as lightrails and perhaps even zeppelins.
Fashion
The slim suit, slim tie look is in now, especially in the black community. His suits are made by Hart Schaffner Marx, who have an affiliate program with CJ. But perhaps the biggest fashion piece will be…
Sunglasses
Ok, this may be a bit of a reach. But if he is the Celebrity in Chief, then things like this don’t sound too far fetched, do they?
Infrastructure Stimulus Package
This time the stimulus package is not (most likely) going to be a deposit into all of our bank accounts. This time it will be for national infrastructure; things like roads, bridges, public transit and energy projects, such as work on the electrical grid to transfer wind and solar power from place to place. It doesn’t sound like it will immediately help the economy. But it will do some good, such as creating jobs and introducing more efficient transportation to areas, such as lightrails and perhaps maglevs.
Another area that may benefit on a local level are schools. This money can go towards repairs, modernization and additional teachers.
If you would like to read more about what this package may affect, read this article.
Generic Drugs
Obama wants to make it easier for Americans to import safe generic drugs from developed countries like Canada. He also supports funding for biotech generic drugs. Both of these industries will see a good boost.
Renegade
Again, perhaps too far fetched. When given the choice by the Secret Service of choosing a name that begins with R, Obama chose Renegade (Though some reports say the name was given to him and not a choice). You will now see this word have a mighty resurgence.
Patriotism
After 9/11, everyone had an American flag somewhere: on their car, their house, a shirt, a hat. American patriotism was at a long-time high. But it didn’t take long for it to disappear. How often do you see cars with flags on them? Or drive by a house with a flag on it? It’s not so common now. Americans have been waiting 7 years for something to be proud of. Perhaps this is it. Seeing how many people have shown to his rallies and his winning speech, and the anticipated turnout for the inauguration speech, I think patriotism will make a comeback.
Peace Corps
Obama wants to double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011. This is a trend I predicted back in August when I blogged about baby boomers retiring. Not sure how you can capitalize on this, other than adding it to a site aimed at baby boomers.
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Do Technology Trends Have Their Own Hype Cycle?
Found a neat chart over at TechCrunch on technology hype cycles, pulled from the Gartner Consulting website. For those of you who do not know about Gartner, they are an IT consulting group that are also known for trend research. This stuff is not free, however TechCrunch got permission to post one of their hype cycle charts.
The picture shown at the top is the July 2008 tech hype cycle.
Gartner explains hype cycles here, but long story short there are five phases of a technology cycle:
- Technology Trigger
- Peak of Inflated Expectations
- Trough of Disillusionment
- Slope of Enlightenment
- Plateau of Productivity
I’ll just go over the emerging trends, as they are probably the most interesting and also the most likely of places to find available domain names.
Context Delivery Architecture is a fancy name for WYNIWYG: What you need is what you get. It’s the idea of focusing on an individuals needs and delivering the goods. Though it is quite low on the chart, it’s obviously been around a long time. Perhaps they are saying that we now have the technology to take this to the next level.
Mobile Robots, something I claimed to possibly be the biggest trend of 2008, and perhaps future. (Yea, I know… it’s hard to argue against the green machine).
Augmented Reality, as defined by Wikipedia, is the combination of the real world and the digital world. For instance, one could wear translucent glasses and through them see the real world, as well as computer generated images that project onto the real world. TranslucentGlasses.com and TranslucentGoggles.com were available, I picked them up.
Surface Computers started hitting the news last year where Microsoft announced a division dedicated to bringing these to the masses. Surface computers can recognize things you set on top of them, such as paint brushes, your finger, plates, whatever. They are aiming at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues.
Cloud Computing is one of the more popular tech trends at the moment. “Cloud” confuses people; just think of it as “Internet Computing” or “Online Computing.” It’s a combination of many internet technologies, but mostly software as a service and web 2.0. Your G-mail, a place where you store your emails online, is a perfect example of cloud computing.
3D Printing has actually been around a long time, but recently has been picking up steam. Personally, I find it boring and almost totally useless. At least so far…
Microblogging is a huge trend right now, thanks largely to Twitter and partly to Pownce. Some businesses are catching on and using microblogging and instant messaging to communicate in the workplace. Large social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn, have incorporated microblogging into their platforms.
Green IT is the practice of using computer resources efficiently.
Of course, this is just one company’s point of view. But I still find it quite interesting and full of material that I can research and find domain names.
Are there any technologies that you think they left out? If so, where would you put them on the hype cycle?
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Labor Day Recap: Vinyl Wall Art Is Now My Top Search Term
Nice to have a day off! Good luck to people being affected by Gustav today and the upcoming days. Being in Houston, what has happened to New Orleans could just as easily have happened to us.
Back on June 21st, I revisited trends from previous posts to see how they were doing. Well, I’m doing it again. I won’t bore you with a recap of every post, but there are a few I wanted to go over starting with the most important one:
Aug 11th - Vinyl Wall Art
I never would have expected it, but the vinyl wall art post has become my most popular post of all time in just under 3 weeks. Not because domainers love it or are linking to it, but because of loads of organic traffic. Vinyl wall art is my number one search term now, even higher than domain related keywords (geodomains is second, in case you were curious). I suppose that’s kind of embarrassing for a domaining blog to admit.
But I think this shows how hot this trend really is. And to give you an idea of what people are typing to find vinyl wall art (at least the ones that got to my site):
- vinyl wall art
- vinyl wall designs
- vinyl art
- vinyl wall
- vinyl sticker wall art
- uk vinyl wall art
- big wall art
- vinyl people wall art
- vinyl wall art home
- how to make vinyl wall stickers
- vinyl wall art blog
- vinyl wall looks real
- vinyl for wall art
And these are directly related to my suggesting that ’80s vinyl wall decals were going to be a big subniche:
- nes vinyl wall
- star wars vinyl wall decals
- star wars wall vinyl
- wall decal big nickelodeon commercial
- ghostbuster wall art (yea, for real)
- mario vinyl wall art
- andy warhol wall decal (Hate to say it, but I told ya so!)
Yea, people really typed those in to get to my blog. Perhaps I should change my focus? hehe…
If TrendDomaining.com is ranking real high for these keywords and people are clicking on them, then the supply is not meeting the demand. Hint hint.
Aug 14th - Olympics
I said that Michael Phelps could do for swimming what Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods did for basketball and golf, respectively.
Of course, it’s too early to tell. But this NY Times report proves this trend is on the right track. From the article: “I don’t want this sport to be an every-four-years sport,” said Phelps. “In between the four years, there’s really not as much exposure as I’d like.”
Aug 7th - Oil Bubble
Well, on August 7th crude oil was about $118 a barrel. Yesterday, August 31st, it was at $120. Not a burst. But it’s still almost $30 lower than it’s high in July. The price of gasoline has gone down, but it doesn’t seem to reflect the huge drop in crude these past 2 months. That’s because these crude oil barrels are futures; the current price of crude is for Octobers gasoline. So don’t fret, the bubble is bursting, even if the price of gas doesn’t reflect it completely; it should come October. Yes I said “should.” Hurricane Gustav or many other things may have a say in it.
Either way, speculators are moving on to something different. Soon we should start seeing reports of money being pumped into alternative energy like never before.
July 7th - Home Servers and Movies-on-demand Boxes
Of course, not long after I wrote this post, news of a Netflix box hit Yahoo. Genius. Blockbuster announced their kiosk business model, which is identical to Redbox and too little too late. It’s just not enough. Netflix gets it, Blockbuster doesn’t.
Vudu has a sleak new box, but it’s still not comparable to what Netflix has.
I feel that eventually every (fortunate) home will have either a home server, movie box or both.
June 30th - Bamboo
I still think bamboo will be one of the biggest trends of the upcoming decade. It just has so many answers for the world.
Though not a site of authority, here is a post that claims bamboo clothing is the next big eco-trend. Here is another company putting it all in on bamboo clothing.
Bamboo is helping computers go green with ASUS finally rolling out it’s bamboo notebooks, Dell’s Hybrid and SimpleTech releasing these nifty external drives.
Since the post, I was able to pick up a couple decent bamboo names:
- BambooRoofing,com
- ShopBamboo,com
Grab bamboo domains now while they’re cheap.
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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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$395 Million Invested Into Virtual Worlds In 2008 Alone
TrendDomaining.com has hit the 2 month mark, and, 40 posts later, I’m still chugging along. I figured I would tap into a fun time of my younger internet days.
As a domainer, I’m sure you know of World of Warcraft (WoW). MMORPG’s have been around for quite a while now.
I was playing Ultima Online(UO), the first big online game, back in 1998. I’ve played dozens of others, including WoW. You just can’t get the same satisfaction playing against a computer that you can against a human being.
People have always looked down upon this genre. Back in the early days it was seen as a highly geeky thing to do. It was almost as taboo as meeting someone online. In fact, it went beyond regular geekhood; geeks made fun of online gamers!
But their numbers grew every year: After UO came Everquest and Asherons Call, and when WoW hit, the genre exploded. WoW now has over 10 million subscribers! Do the math at $14.95 a month.
By this time, online games drew a more diverse fanbase including younger- or to be more fair and accurate: immature- players. Online games are now stereotyped as being cesspools of immature players. And it’s hard to argue against that; it’s the main reason why I stopped playing them.
The genre had a hard time breaking out of the fantasy setting until fairly recently. Online universes are turning more into alternative realities, or virtual worlds, with Second Life and now Lively.
Like meeting people online, online games are mainstream and considered (almost) “acceptable.” And this is just the beginning.
Virtual Worlds Management has published an article detailing the money being pumped into this genre this year alone. $395 million have been invested into 39 virtual worlds so far in 2008! The largest investments have been in the companies Turbine and Realtime Worlds with $40m and $50m, respectively.
These games have some hardcore dedicated fans in large numbers; most willing to spend a few extra dollars to help enhance their game experience. WoW aside, do a search for Age of Conan (AoC). You’ll see fansite after fansite: community sites, forums, auctionhouses, guilds etc. And they all need domain names.
Just stay away from the trademarks. It may be hard to find an alternative to WoWAuctions.com, but it’s worth avoiding the trouble.
Now how do you tell what will be the next WoW? Big franchises are usually a good gamble, like Warhammer or Harry Potter. Or take a successful Star Wars game and throw in BioWare to get Knights of the Old Republic Online. These games can take years to create, so it can be costly to buy those names early on in production. Especially if the game fails. But the payoff could be nice.
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