It is now possible to make a whois search for the new European dot .eu domain from EURid.eu’s site. You can here see whether a domain name is queued for registration during the sunrise period, or whether it is reserved og blocked for registration. For instance you can see that the domain domain.eu is registered 36 times, at what time and by wich company or person. Also you can see that the domain denmark.eu is reserved by the state of Denmark and that the domain co.eu is blocked.

So in this whois search you can follow whether someone is already trying to register a domain name, which you might be interested in buying after February 7th or April 7th.

It will be interesting to see how double registrations will be filtered down to one owner, and whether everybody will be satisfied with this process. Domains where the filtration has to be hardest is with the domain names (Source: EURid.eu’s press release):

sex.eu > 193 applications
hotel.eu > 103 applications
travel.eu > 84 applications
jobs.eu > 80 applications
hotels.eu > 79 applications
casino.eu > 73 applications
poker.eu > 67 applications
golf.eu > 63 applications
business.eu > 62 applications
shopping.eu > 61 applications
porn.eu > 61 applications
music.eu > 60 applications

See earlier articles here, here and here.

It seems now clear that a new public beta of Internet Explorer (IE7) will be launched in the first months of 2006, and will be available for download to whom might be interested.

For all owners of IDN-domains (Internationalized Domain Names) this might be good news. The new IE7 should support IDN-domain names as all other browsers already do (Microsoft-Watch IEblog). This means that all the many owners (including my self) of language specific domains will finally will be able to use them for real. Until now these domains have practically been useless, because the majority of all web users still are using IE. But one still have to wait until most people have downloaded the new IE7.

The new European dot eu domain name (se my previous posts here and here) seems to have gotten an intense start. In the first 15 minutes 40.000 applied and after an hour more than 80.000 had applied for the first and restricted sunrise and 13.55 95.370 had applied. Of these 75.306 where unike (only one applicant for each domai name), 620 by geographical origin, 7.225 by public bodies, 66.852 by national trade marks and 20.673 by community and international trade marks (source: EURid.eu’s press page).

The first three applications:

tickets.eu > received at 11:00:01.699
job.eu > received at 11:00:01.711
hotels.eu > received at 11:00:01.712

The five most applied domain names:

sex.eu > 193 applications
hotel.eu > 103 applications
travel.eu > 84 applications
jobs.eu > 80 applications
hotels.eu > 79 applications
casino.eu > 73 applications
poker.eu > 67 applications
golf.eu > 63 applications
business.eu > 62applications
shopping.eu > 61applications
porn.eu > 61 applications
music.eu > 60 applications

This gives an indication about, where the big money on the Internet is. Now the funny big fight about providing evidence proofing that the companies have a right for all the different names.

Somebody has probably heard about the new upcoming generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) with the extension .xxx., which should be reserved for web sites with pornographic content. Last week ICANN (the highest domain authority) had to approve the launch of this long awaited .xxx domain at there board meeting.

But at the board meeting in Vancouver last Thursday ICANN’s chairman Vint Cerf (yes, it is that Vint Cerf, who invented the Internet and now works for Google) decided to postpone the decision of the approval of the .xxx domain. See the story here: zdnet.co.uk and theregister.com.

There are conspiracy speculations about, that the delay of the domain is not caused by missing time for reading a 350 page report, but caused by big politics on highest level. The rumours say, that an EU-commisioner intervened in the process. Again other rumours claim, that US-president Bush is the reason for the delay, because he has been lobbied by the Christian right, but that he is in need of not being appearing as the guy who sabotaged the .xxx domain because of the negotiations about global inter control.

The general discussions about the new porn domain has mainly been about, whether porn will become more accessible on the one hand, and whether it will be easier to block on the other hand. But again, I don’t think that any established porn sites on present domains would close down because there is a new domain. In the end, I think it is all about domain business.

The following domains are for sale. Send me an offer if you would like to buy some of them.

adra.info
alinko.com
basium.com
borduria.com
bors.info
carreidas.com
conovo.com
domainlink.org
etno.info
gixa.com
linka.info
linx.info
newstaxi.com
newz.biz
nize.info
oago.com
poax.com
spex.info
syldavia.com
vupe.com
w3f.net
zerl.com