Hair Of The Dot. Dog

Dot.BMW, Dot.dog and Dot.Singapore may soon become three of many new domains now that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) the nonprofit Internet coordinating body has approved the development.

The only catch is that a  person, company or government wanting to secure such a domain-name suffix will need to fork out the princely sum of $185,000 to make their application and this will put such an initiative beyond the budgets of many SME's.

This however is not the end of the cost.  For having secured the domain, there is then an annual fee to Icann of about $25,000, among other costs such as hosting and domain management

Registering a new extension for your company is an excellent branding idea but the cost of doing so and maintaining it will be prohibitive for most.

So the Dot.Com party is finally a thing of the past and we have entered (to quote the WSJ) the age of Dot. Anything.

Will this development make it easier for the consumer, or more difficult as they search through an ever expanding array of domains for the company or service that they seek?

Going to the Dot.Doctor will never be easier.

Read All About It

While a plethora of new domains might make finding relevant information more of a challenge, a new service from the Newseum allows a reader to feel the pulse of the world through an interactive map of newspaper front pages.

Front pages of the World - Flash version

Through a special agreement with more than 800 newspapers worldwide, the Newseum displays these front pages each day on its website. The front pages are in their original and unedited form and are viewable in either the Flash or Bing Beta versions.  Personally I prefer the latter (see below) as the pop-up windows are easier to navigate.

Bing Beta version

Related articles

• Brand name Top Level Domains coming (zdnet.com)
• ICANN Approves Generic Top-Level Domains: New Era of Innovation or A Flood of Spam? (readwriteweb.com)

Professional Networking - Why It Matters

TheDigitalConsultant LinkedIn Network
(Associates named removed)
Click in image then click again for the larger chart

The Tools and Links section of this blog contains links to many programmes that can create visualisations of your networks.

One of the more interesting is LinkedIn Maps which maps your professional network and demonstratesthe relationships between you and your connections.

In today's world where skills are increasingly being traded as much as money, your personal brand is all important.

Visualising your professional networks will enable you to see the areas where you can and need to build associations. Restricting your associations to school friends and employees is not going to get you far.

As LinkedIn's Ali Imam says. "With it you can better leverage your professional network to help pass along job opportunities, seek professional advice, gather insights, and more."

Joining LinkedIn groups allied to your brand also provides a great marketing opportunity for the products and services you provide. In the case of this blog for example,  referrals from LinkedIn outnumber those from Facebook 2-1.






 DJ Patil is the Chief Scientist at LinkedIn and in the above video he is explaining his network on large sheets of paper. Clearly I have a lot of networking still to do!

Related articles

• Professional Social Network LinkedIn Prices IPO At $45 Per Share, High End Of Range (techcrunch.com)