Via FunnyOrDie.com:

The Digg-style domaining website DNHour.com has been put up for sale by its owners via Sedo’s marketplace. DNHour.com is a portal where you can submit domain-related news articles, which can then be rated by the website’s members. I used to submit articles to DNHour myself for some time, but it has been obvious that the owners didn’t put too much time into their site anymore after its quick and successful start about one year ago.

Still, DNHour.com has been a good service for everybody interested in the latest domain news. Although it faces competition from Domaining.com and other similar services, I think there is some potential for further development.

The owner has set an asking price of $2,500 at Sedo. According to the listing, DNHour.com received about 6,600 unique visitors in August, which resulted in just under 13,000 page views. DNHour.com has a PR4 and an Alexa ranking near 120,000. Details about the site’s revenue haven’t been provided, yet.

Details can be found on Sedo’s for sale page.

http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2008/08/domainer_loses_1.htm

Eric Goldman, Assistant Professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law and Director of the school’s High-Tech Law Institute, made a post about domain lawsuits on his blog yesterday.

The post, which I linked to above, outlines the recent rulings in the lawsuit of Verizon California vs. Navigation Catalyst Systems.

He writes:

This is an extremely interesting and potentially precedent-setting case regarding domaining and domain name tasting. The court condemns both practices, leading to a preliminary injunction against the domainer and its registrar based on the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA). (…) As a result, this is a major loss for domainers and might very well force them to change their practices.

The defendants are Navigation Catalyst, a domainer, and Basic Fusion, its registrar. Navigation Catalyst engaged in some common domainer practices, including:

* high volume automated domain name tasting. Many of the registered domains have nothing to do with anyone’s trademark, but some were typographical error versions of Verizon’s trademarks (allegedly, nearly 1400 were variations of Verizon’s trademarks)
* trademark “scrubbing” of domain names during the tasting period (both an automated blacklist and a manual review)
* disabling ads on any challenged domains and offering to transfer those domain names to the trademark owner

To me Goldman makes it sound like all domainers engaged in domain tasting, cybersquatting and typosquatting. But that is far from the truth! I’ve said this too often already and I actually don’t want to repeat myself, but it has to be said again: There might be domain investors registering and monetizing trademark-infringing domains. This practice doesn’t reflect the entire domain industry, however. Most professional domain investors, by which I mean those making a living off domaining, invest in generic keyword domains.

In the case discussed by Goldman, the preliminary ruling has been in favor of Verizon. Nothing wrong about that as far as I can tell, since there were TM domains involved. On the other hand, it’s also good to see that the defendants called attention to Verizon’s practice of monetizing typo and trademark traffic via its FIOS “service”, although the court didn’t want to hear about it.

Domain tasting as well as the registration of typo domains is a problem that has to be dealt with, but as far as I can tell it is no common practice among the majority of domainers anymore, despite what Goldman is saying. The industry has matured and it will continue to do so in the future. One-sided articles such as Goldman’s blog post wrongfully create a bad image of the domain business. This, in turn, will lead to misinformed companies and lawyers suing domain registrants and registrars for their generic domain names!

Unfortunately, it can be observed that there is an increasing number of lawsuits against domain owners who rightfully hold valuable keyword or acronym domains only to be sued by large companies that don’t have any comprehensible right to own the domain in question in the first place. Just take the recent LH.com ruling as an example. Lufthansa won the lawsuit against Future Media Architects and it was awarded this valuable two-letter domain name practically for free. That ruling was a joke, in my opinion, and what is even worse, is that such rulings will only motivate more companies to try their best, no matter whether they hold a related trademark or not. For your information, Ron Jackson did a good job writing about this issue in his July 2008 newsletter, giving you the other side of the story so to speak.

As reported by DN Journal, there have been two very nice .org sales: Both Ringtones.org and Revolution.org were sold for $120,000.

There have already been some other high-value .org deals this year, including Sexe.org ($151,400), Coffee.org ($100,000), PI.org ($40,000) and No.org ($37,500). Army.org changed hands for $99,000 last year. In 2006, Date.org and Loan.org were sold for $150,349 and $105,500 respectively. In 2003, Engineering.org was sold for $198,000.

I have always liked .org, because it’s a generic TLD that I think many can relate to. It makes sense to have this top-level domain in place, as opposed to the recently introduced unnecessary TLDs. I guess that is why the .org gTLD continues to grow in popularity and why we’re seeing more solid .org sales. Now, the market is small compared to .com, but with reported sales in the six-figure dollar range I’m sure we will be seeing some other top-dollar sales soon.

Some of the domain sales mentioned above, including Ringtones.org for instance, aren’t even appropriate to the DotORG extension. Imagine the sales prices we’ll be seeing when more appropriate keyword .org domains will be put on the market.

http://www.ricklatona.com/2008/07/17/go-big-or-go-home-ricklatonacom-is-now-in-the-live-auction-business/

Domain reseller Rick Latona today broke the news about him doing a live domain auction at the upcoming T.R.A.F.F.I.C. domain conference in New York in September. This makes him the third auctioneer to be privileged to sell domains at the prestigious domain event.

The two other domain auction houses known to date are Moniker and Thought Convergence (TrafficZ). I think it’s likely that Sedo/GreatDomains will be another broker having a live auction there, but this hasn’t been confirmed yet. As I wrote earlier this week, Rick Schwartz has announced that there will be a total of five live domain auctions held by different companies.

Rick Latona has been a very active buyer and seller of domain names for years and he sends out a successful domain sales newsletter to interested buyers. He has been the seller of some valuable domains, including EdistoBeach.com ($115,000), Jake.com ($100,000), FollyBeach.com ($98,000), Trusts.com ($75,000), HTTPS.com ($50,000), RaceTracks.com ($49,000), ChristChurch.com ($45,000), JP.net ($25,000) and many others.