EightBlack.

Domaining is one of those things I never really paid much attention to.

Now I sort of wished I had. A bit like your parents telling you the story of their wise old uncle who bought beachfront property all those years ago - when everyone was wondering why.

Now the same old uncle is laughing in his grave. And his children are eternally grateful - thats one thing for sure.

It makes sense though.

Virtual property (ie domain names) is similar to the physical stuff. There’s only a finite amount of it available.

Apparently - the .mobi and .tv extensions will soon become as valuable as the plain old dot com extensions.

Later this year (supposedly around June/July) the Australian regulator of domain names will be in essence, de-regulating the market and when they do, you can bet there will be a frenzy of activity in the space.

Now’s the time to act if you haven’t already registered every domain name with every extension possible of your own business.

For example, with our new entity - TaguchiMail - we own every variation of the domain (well, the ones we want at least). If you’re starting up a new business or have an established one, it’s hardly good business sense, especially for the sake of less than $20 bucks a year, to forfeit any domain even remotely attached to your business.

There are a lot smarter domain guys in Australia than me. Ed Keay-Smith is one of them. He’s also a trusted colleague who I’ve known since 2004. More on him here.

The biggest guys in the US play in a league of their own. Guys like Bob Parsons and Monte Cahn make the whole industry of domaining look easy. Which it isn’t.

Bottom line - especially for the Aussie’s who read this. It’s time to put some resource in protecting your Australian domain name. No point crying about it later.

I’ve been having this recurring conversation for about a month now (no, not about Jessica Alba, about something else).

It all started after I listened to an interview between Perry Marshall and Monte Cahn, the founder and CEO of DomainSystems Inc,

I was then at a conference a few weeks ago in Chicago and sat beside a guy who just for the fun of it, bought and sold property. We’re not talking one or two. We’re talking ten or twenty at a time.

He then said he’d met a old buddy of mine - Ed Dale. And that he’d been to Ed’s course on buying and selling internet domains.

I haven’t spoken to Ed for ages, but it was Ed who was responsible for getting me into this space. I’m not sure whether to thank him or scream at him - maybe both. Some days this business is the most challenging, most frustrating, most overly complex thing I’ve experienced. Other days, I think to myself that there’s no better business to be in.

That’s probably true for a lot of businesses.

But back to domains. This has been a big business for ages. I’m not talking about commercial grade web hosting. I’m talking about the finite quantity of “internet real estate” thats out there.

Like physical property, the online world has its share of waterfront assets, and then its share of stuff thats virtually inhabitable. Stuff you wouldn’t put your mother in law in.

But domain real estate is hotting up because of the age old fundamental regarding any type of property. Supply and Demand. And at this very moment, and with more and more websites being launched by the minute, the demand for quality, marketable domains is running out.

If you have an online presence, how many domains do you own? Have you “ring fenced” every domain around your anchor domain? Do you own the .mobi extension of your website? If not, why not?