Name Intelligence is holding an auction next month in conjunction with its Domain Roundtable conference. They just published their first list of names that will go on the auction block. If I were buying, I'd go for autobiography.com (no. 21 on the list). What a terrific name for an online site. To my way of thinking, the potential to build a successful company (and one of those TechCrunchy Web 2.0 companies to boot!) is much greater with autobiography.com than with the other names on the list.

So anyone want to lend me $250,000....?

Inside my head, I've always seen domain name registrations as clouds. I took some time earlier this week to illustrate these name clouds. You can see them in today's post on Name Brief. They use pretty colors.

If there's one part of ICANN that is working well, it's the Nominating Committee. It's time for the NomComm's periodic review though, but my input is rather simple: leave it alone. It's working.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I have a new web site covering developments in the domain name industry. It's called Name Brief. You can find it at www.namebrief.com. Today I'm starting a week-long series on domain names composed of typographical errors of other, better known domain names.

Google is selling domain names for $10/year, which includes the domain name registration, a whois privacy service, email, a start page, and a whole bundle of additional Google applications. Name Brief has the details.

From New Orleans' NOLA.com: "Ticket sales for the Randy Travis concert to be held at the Castine Center in Mandeville Sunday abruptly halted Wednesday when the ticketing portal at cornerstonecares.com was hijacked by a domain name registration company operating as Registerfly.com. Cornerstone Church pastor Doug Gilford said he is disheartened.... 'It is a travesty to have such a great opportunity as the Randy Travis concert thwarted by a company's total disregard for others. I am praying that God will show his might at this 11th hour for us,' Gilford said."

If it's a Registerfly problem, this might be a time when Bob Parsons can do more than the Almighty.

This post sponsored by Wondrous.com.

I've been fortunate enough to have spent the last two months using an unlocked, carrier-independent HTC Touch Phone (product specs here), that has much of the 'wow' of the iPhone (with an earlier release date than the iPhone), without some of the iPhone's infamous limitations (AT&T only, no third-party apps, no Skype, heavy weight and size). The HTC Touch runs Windows Mobile® 6 Professional and uses Windows Media Player for its music. It's quite nice.

But for all the ways HTC beats Apple in form factor and openness, it's still running Windows. This means my phone crashes from time to time. That's not a joke. It really crashes. It also means I get errors like this one when trying to play music I'm paying for through the Urge music service. Apple has DRM too, but the iPhone would never do this. Apple may have its own walled garden, but at least it covers the wall with ivy and climbing roses and makes you forget it's there.

This post sponsored by Gizimo.com.

Someone came up with a new list of the seven man-made wonders of the world. Now, really, what's more wondrous? Some old buildings and statutes...or the Internet? The Internet wasn't even a finalist.

This post sponsored by Wondrous.com.

Stéphane Van Gelder reports that Paris has submitted a bid to host an ICANN meeting in 2008.

This post sponsored by Wondrous.com.

Bill Thompson, in a commentary on the BBC titled 'Time to let a thousand domains bloom?':


This post sponsored by SailModel.com.