Everyone who follows the domain name industry understands that many registrars sell names at ultra-low margins and the upsell related services, like hosting and email, in order to make their profit. If you look around the registrar ranks, you'll see a healthy variety of add-on services at the point of sale. But I was surprised to see Dotster adding "Public Relations Services," including "Crisis Management," for its domain name customers. The prices are not trivial, but they're fixed, flat rate, which should be attractive to a lot of small businesses that don't typically need PR services.

Now that registrars are upselling services, I suppose the next offering will be legal services.....

P.S. In light of that last quip, I should add, in all seriousness, that I've been surprised a registrar hasn't offered "UDRP insurance" for registrants. I've long thought that this would be an attractive, profitable add-on for domainers with modest portfolios.

You've got to try the latest tool from the Domain Tools folks. It's called psychic whois. I could play with it all day.

Next week starts my fourth year coaching Little League baseball. I've spent the last three years coaching my son up through the ranks of T-Ball and Coach Pitch, but this year I'm moving way back down to the 5- and 6-year old set to coach my daughters in T-Ball. I have a lot of material from past years that I want to gather together and publish on the web for the parents (and other interested people). I also have several things I want to write up during the new season. Which brings me to my technical question....

I want to write and publish items periodically in blog format, which means they'll trail "blogwards" down the page from newest to oldest. I also want to keep the items organized in book format, so the introductory material precedes the "how to buy a glove" material which precedes the "safety" material which precedes the drills, etc. So how do I do this? What tool do I use to write my new items so they are viewable in both modes. Someone following the site everyday will be interested in viewing the material in blog format. Someone coming to it once, as a resource for youth baseball, will want to read it in "book mode."

OPML seems like the right format, but I need to be able to publish my OPML both in the outline format and in a blogwards format. Any ideas? Email or comments please.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech, as a podcast. It's a repeat post from years past, but it never gets old. Listen to it again.

ICANN's Revised Agreement on .XXX: "A revised proposed agreement with ICM providing for designation of a .XXX sTLD registry is published for public comment. The public comment period will be open until 5 February 2007."

It's January 5th. My neighbor just called to complain that one of my trees is dropping its leaves, and the wind is blowing them into his pool.

ICANN is now reporting: "The ICANN Board considered the [.XXX] agreement at its meeting on 10 May 2006 and voted not to approve the agreement as proposed, but did not reject the application. The applicant has continued to work to modify the agreement in order to address public policy issues raised by the GAC. ICM and ICANN Staff have been renegotiating a revised agreement in preparation for community review and board consideration. ICANN will post that agreement upon completion of the present round of discussions for public comment."

This is big news.

Happy New Year! And welcome to 2007, the year of new gTLDs.