Matt Schlicht, one of the clever Web pranksters at minds1anda.com, has punked us. He registered valleywag.org, and turned it into a mashup of our site and MySpace, with "Here Comes Another Bubble" by the Richter Scales playing incessantly in the background. (Why didn't we register the domain first? Fair question. I…
Top New York sales Googler leaves to go startup
David Hirsch, one of Google's earliest salespeople, is leaving the company after eight years to advise startups, Silicon Alley Insider reports. His track record is mixed: He helped launch Google's attempts to broker print ads, an effort which has met with little success. But having joined the company early enough…
Bisexual.com goes on sale in 10 days
Moniker, a domain-name auction house, is selling bisexual.com and a long list of other thoroughly NSFW domain names in an auction January 13-15. The domain-name business is "extremely dirty," Michael Arrington has said — and he should know, since he spent a fair amount of time in it before launching TechCrunch. I'm…
Kevin Rose, Julia Allison to date
Notorious nerdbody Julia Allison, the Star editor-at-large best known for her geek conquests, has this to share with Valleywag: Digg cofounder Kevin Rose has asked her out on a date. Really, could she have come with a more thoughtful present for a gossip blogger? How sweet. Let me go out on a limb here with my…
Gmail users end up at GM.com by mistake
The Freakonomics blog and search-data company Hitwise found that there are quite a few Gmail users who accidentally end up at GM.com when they mean to go to Gmail.com. In fact, 0.94 percent of GM.com visitors go to Gmail.com on their next page load versus 0.14 percent for Toyota.com to Gmail. No word from GM, but…
Nissan.com vs. the French government (and the automaker, too)
Freakonomics coauthor Steven Levitt posits that the no matter who first claims a domain name, the Web address will ultimately end up in the hands of the party most of us would expect. This is because the brand you know likely values domain names associated with its brand the most. Apple, for example, made sure to…
Google funds one in five typo domains
When you fat-finger a website address, so-called "typosquatters" are set to profit. They register domains like iohone.com that are just one mistyped letter away from the real one, and make money from ads served on those pages. What's worse, Google is helping them. Nearly one in five typo domains use Google's AdSense…
Record $300,000 paid for recycle.co.uk
The domain name recycle.co.uk was sold at auction for £150,000 (roughly $317,000) by British startup incubator ASAP Ventures. This is the highest price ever paid for a .co.uk domain name, the British equivalent of .com. ASAP will use the name for a new company that will provide consumers with information on…
The shortest domain name ever
Google has purchased the shortest possible domain name to make it easier for Chinese users to find Google: g.cn. Interestingly, "g.com," along with most other single-letter and single-digit domain names are reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. The IANA is the master arbiter of domain names and…
Facebook has registered Facebook.cn. Already, 100,000 Facebook members belong to its China regional network and alumni groups for Peking Univeristy and Fudan University. The company hasn't yet announced expansion plans and the move might be more of an effort to protect its trademark in China, where a local already…
The Whois domain-name directory may be dismantled because of a deadlock in negotiations regarding privacy concerns. "What removing the [directory] will do is force all of the actors to come together without the benefit of a status quo to fall back on and say, 'We are now all screwed. What will we do?' It will lead to…
Aussie rockers AC/DC have finally won access to the domain name acdc.com from a porn company that was redirecting traffic to sexually explicit sites. Now, kids searching for the band that keeps rocking after more than 30 years won't be exposed to dirty deeds. One wonders if hearing the song is any substitute. [The…
Typosquatter John Zuccarini has agreed to give up $164,000 in revenue from ads served to misspelled domains. Zuccarini had previously served two years in Federal prison for serving porn ads to misspelled children's domains including teltubbies.com and bobthebiulder.com. (Remember John Ashcroft? Zuccarini always will.)…
Meet .me, the best new domain
In a move that nearly makes up for ".biz," ICANN officially phased out the .yu domain of the now-dead nation of Yugoslavia, replacing it with .rs for Serbia and .me for Montenegro (which should go on sale early next year). Maybe .me can do for Montenegro what .tv did for the island nation of Tuvalu; for those who…
Boing Boing to launch daily Internet-TV show
Is any blogger still satisfied with merely blogging? The quirky alternative website Boing Boing, which claims 7.5 million monthly viewers, will debut a daily online video show Wednesday. After closet negotiations with national networks, the Boing Boingers decided to go it alone and own the show themselves. But this…
AOL wants a tasty chunk of the 9 million people addicted to the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft. Its rumored plan is to lure WOW players into AOL's clutches with a dedicated social network at its wow.com domain, dormant for years. Just one problem: Is it setting itself up for a cybersquatting lawsuit? […
In 2005 Facebook bought the Facebook.com domain name for $200,000. Now, Facebook has gotten ahold of Face-book.com via a ruling from the World Intellectual Property Organization. So, how much did it cost them this time? Aside from its own lawyers fees, just $1,500 to the WIPO dispute resolution service. [The Register]
Rupert Murdoch takes website away from 7-year-old girl
News Corp., under CEO Rupert Murdoch, already has developed a reputation for stealing websites, when a Fox television show or advertiser covets a desirable URL on the MySpace social network. But Murdoch's website-snatching ways extend further than that. On Wednesday, News Corp. and NBC Universal announced that their…
Dirty dotcoms, done dirt cheap
No wonder TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, formerly CEO at domain-name trader Pool.com, was so eager to get out of what he's called the "extremely dirty domain name business": Moniker.com is now putting 257 ultrafilthy domains up for sale at a live auction to be held August 4 in Hollywood, Fla. The list includes…
