Domaining Manual

Company wins three letter domain name through arbitration.

Smith Travel Research, Inc, which provides hotel benchmarking services, has won the three letter domain name STR.com at arbitration.

In the decision by a National Arbitration Forum panelist, the respondent was found to have registered the domain in bad faith and have no legitimate interests in the domain.

The respondent used the domain name for a travel web site, earning referral fees for sending traffic to travel sites. The logo at the top of the site reads “STR.com Search for Travels & Reservations / Book hotels online”. Many of the pages of the site are not complete and say development will be finished in Spring 2009.

The respondent argued that the complainant merely provides research to the hotel industry, whereas STR.com provides hotel bookings to consumers. The arbitrator didn’t buy it, and suggested that the domain was registered to specifically target Smith Travel Research.

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[Join Andrew Allemann on Bido today at 1 PM EDT for live chat!]

Bido is making a couple smart changes to its auction platform in an upcoming release.

First, Bido will start offering multiple auctions per day. It’s unclear how these will take place, but it could be several at the same time or one per hour (or half hour) throughout the day.

Second, expert users will now be able to vote on which domain names will be auctioned off. This is a great way to use crowd sourcing to figure out which domains have the most potential. Because the voting will be limited to registered users who have applied to be experts, it should prevent much of the gaming that could take place if anyone could vote on the domains to be auctioned.

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Celebrities win domain names through arbitration.

As a follow up to Domain Name Wire’s earlier stories, both Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz have won their respective domain names through arbitration proceedings.

Actor and comedian Jim Carrey filed his case in April with World Intellectual Property Organization to get the domain name JimCarrey.com. According to Compete.com, JimCarrey.com gets a few hundred unique visitors per month.

Actress Cameron Diaz filed a case with National Arbitration Forum in April to get CameronDiaz.com.

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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.

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