I'm back in Los Angeles. After the rainiest season in 100 years, the city has never been so green. The hills behind my house make me think I'm living in Maui.  

RegistryPro has opened a discussion forum on the marketing and sale of .pro domain names to non-credentialed professionals. It looks like it will be about as effective as the ICANN comment forums. But it did prompt this letter from ICANN's Tina Dam.  

For one question posted on the forum, I already have the answer. Someone asked "Why aren't registrars other than Encirca offering this?" I've spoken with several registrars and the consensus seems to be that they will wait and see how it shakes out with ICANN. If what Encirca is doing is acceptable, then they'll offer it too. They'll have to because it will become a competitive issue. I get that. So Encirca is the test. The fraudulent registrations either stop now or we open up the TLD to everyone.

A fellow claiming to be a "Michael J. Silver," a volume .pro domain name speculator, has been posting a lot of comments below. He claims to be a lawyer, but I'm fairly certain he's not. The misspellings, grammatical errors and faux pomposity (that people often associate with lawyers) give him away. There are six "Michael J. Silver"'s licensed to practice law in the United States. None of them live in Biloxi, Mississippi.  

The nice thing about .PRO, of course, is that I don't have to take his word that he's a lawyer. He can simply sign an e-mail with his .PRO digital certificate to prove it....

Any idea how to delete trackback spam in a Blogware blog?

I really wish I could make it to the Domain Roundtable in Seattle in May. (Details here.) Given other things going on, I don't think it's going to be possible, but I'm working on it.

I sort of liked the name "Nigeria Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers."   

One PC Forum session that has stayed with me is the one on presence. As I understood it, "presence" on the Internet is availability and access. If you've used an instant messaging service, then you've already seen first generation "presence" at work ("I'm available," "I'm away from my computer," "Gone Fishing," etc.). The next generation of services will integrate the concept of presence into everything we do -- voice, IM, e-mail. They'll also integrate hierarchies into presence: I'm here for you, but not for you, or here for clients but not for friend, etc. Until they can guess what I want, however, I wonder how well it can work. As I long as I have to change the settings on something to update my status, it's not worth the effort.

I'm here.