sheldon's blog

Hi everyone,

I want to write yet another opinion piece blasting Marissa Mayer's change to Yahoo's work from home policy. Just kidding… I want to throw my two cents in about the other thing that is being over written about. If you've been following the news, you'll recognize that the intro to this blog entry is a subtle tribute to the Hall of Fame worthy goodbye letter that the CEO of Groupon sent to his employees upon being dismissed.

The release of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system is a good time to have a discussion about the overhyped death of the desktop environment. If you're not yet familiar with the qualities of Windows 8, it's the first operating system designed from the core to be both a touchscreen operating system and also a traditional GUI driven operating system.

People used to pick domain names based on how they appeared to search engines because there was a belief that having the right words in your domain name would give you killer search engine rankings. That may have been true at some point, but if you're choosing domain names for SEO points, you're wasting your money. 

You are not choosing a domain name to bump your search engine rankings. You are choosing a domain name so that people can remember where to find you so they can tell other people about your business or organization.

We've recently seen a rash of phishing emails that seem to be getting confused as potentially legitimate emails from us. The emails typically look something like this:

This is old news, but it bears posting because people continue to fall vicitm to it. There's a few companies well known for sending people bogus domain name registration reminder notices through the mail. The best known one is the Domain Name Registry of America, but by the time you read this, their name may have changed or a copycat sham business may be doing the same dirty deeds.

If you've ever researched a domain name that you wanted, but waited to register it only to find out a day or two later that it's been claimed by some mysterious company, read on. There are some shady players who are running a domain name registration scam that tries to buy the domain names that you want so they can sell it back to you at exorbitant rates. This isn't the old practice of cyber-squatting that was common in the boom years. This is far more pervasive.