A John Johnston tweet the other day, asking about the trading of Twitter usernames, has me wondering, are we soon to see ridiculous sums of money change hands for such names, as we do domain names? Anyone know of any Twitter usernames being traded lately? If so do you know for how much?

More on the potential chaos that could, or will, ensue as a result of ICANN's change in Top Level Domain policy. What will brand owners have to do now in order to protect their brand? On one hand this means we don't have to all fight and scrape to grab any brand followed by a .com. But it also means there'll be a land rush to create and ... Read full entry

ICANN's change in policy for domain name extensions, or Top Level Domains (TLD), might be good news for domain speculators (and even ICANN itself), but for the rest of us it could usher in an era of confusion when it comes to finding some websites. If anything, this actually devalues .com domain names - many browsers currently assume ".com" for any ... Read full entry

Under changes that came into effect yesterday, it is apparently now a lot easier to buy an Australian domain, or dot AU, name that has recently expired, than it was before. Even if the "erstwhile" owner had, say, forgotten to make a licence renewal payment on the day of the name's renewal, it now seemingly goes up for grabs immediately, according to Bruce Tonkin (video, 4 mins approx), Chief Technology ... Read full entry

Israel.com: Bidding Starts At $5.5 Million But if you can't afford Israel.com, current owner Moniker.com has other domain names that are slightly less expensive. Pay.com should be of interest to someone in the financial world. Three-letter domains have been bought up for years, and an actual word possesses even more value. It's an instant branding boost to whoever buys it. Some of the million-dollar and up domains include yachts.com, AffiliateProgram.com, ... Read full entry

The allure of the .com domain name The latest internet statistics from Domain Tools reveal the unrivaled popularity of the .com domain name, with over 76 million registrations. .net names come in a distant second with almost 11.5 million name registrations. As of May 2008, there were 76,007,285 active and registered .com domain names. This compares to 11,397,594 .net names, 6,772,308 .org names, 5,037,335 .info names, 1,968,760 .biz names, ... Read full entry

Red Bull wins redbullsucks.com from energy drink rival A recent ruling by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has interesting implications protest websites owners, seeking to highlight alleged product and service short comings, after they ordered Carl Gamel, owner of redbullsucks.com, to hand the domain over to Red Bull. In this case WIPO's decision was based on the fact redbullsucks.com was being used to promote a rival energy drink, ... Read full entry

USSR stirs sentiments Gone, but not forgotten, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR, lives on in cyberspace, where registrations of the Soviet domain name .su continue to grow in popularity. Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising - registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing ... Read full entry

By the time the WP timestamp serves this post, all DNS redirects should have kicked in, and required nameserver changes should have propagated "across the whole Internet", and disassociated.com.au should be back. Go there and come right back here. :) I first registered the name in 1997, hence disassociated's tag-line "dissecting the {SubSet} culture since 1997". w00t!

$1 million adds a letter ‘s’ to a Net address There's still plenty of money to be made in generic domain name speculating game. A British travel company has paid $1.1 million for the domain name cruises.co.uk, a price that is effectively $1 million just for the letter "s" since it already owns the address cruise.co.uk. The sum shatters the previous record for a .co.uk domain of $300,000, paid in ... Read full entry