Have you checked out my new web site TravelVoyeur.com yet? It’s really a fun site with some great travel videos and slide shows. Check it out and let me know what you think. And if you have a travel -related site, let me know if you want to trade links. Or if you have ideas on who I can trade links with, or ideas on increasing traffic, let me know as well.

Here’s Mount Everest Climb 2004 an example of a typical blog entry on the Travel Voyeur site.

Mount Everest Climb 2004

Have you dreamed of climbing Mount Everest? Now you have chance to see what it’s like in an awesome, short video posted to Youtube by user rahulrathan. There are no credits so I cannot tell the names of those who have made the climb. But it is an incredible film of a May 12th - May 16th, 2004 climb by several men from Base Camp to through the Khumbu Icefall at Camp 2 at 21,300 ft (6500 m) to the summit at 29,028 (8848 m). Narration by one of the climbers along the way.

Britannica on Mount Everest:

Peak on the crest of the Himalayas, southern Asia. The highest point on Earth, with a summit at 29,035 ft (8,850 m), it lies on the border between Nepal and Tibet (China). Numerous attempts to climb Everest were made from 1921; the summit was finally reached by Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal in 1953. In dispute is whether the English explorer George Mallory, whose body was discovered below Everest’s peak in 1999, had actually reached the peak earlier, in 1924, and was descending it when he died. The formerly accepted elevation of 29,028 ft (8,848 m), established in the early 1950s, was recalculated in the late 1990s.

For more information, see the Answers.com entry on Mount Everest.

I had this site written in Expression Engine instead of Wordpress for a change. Let me know if you have any questions about EE, not that I’m an expert yet.

If you’ve got a blog, you know I’d love it if you could mention TravelVoyeur.com!

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, travel, blog, everest, mountain climbing, Himalayas, Tibet, Nepal

On November 26th, I finally had to go public on NamePros.com with my bitching about Sedo’s policy of placing negotiation comments “under review” until the next business day (which is often three calendar days). I had bugged many Sedo employees about this for the last year privately, and I only got polite excuses on how they didn’t want anyone to get hurt feelings with insensitive remarks.

So, I began the thread called Sedo Comments “Under Review” Sucks! . This thread finally brought in a Sedo rep, but even with the pleas from Namepros members, they held their ground. Well, about a week or two ago I started noticing that my comments were going through. I could actually conduct business during U.S. nights and weekends!

Here’s the initial post of the thread:

Listen Sedo, I’m a big customer of yours. I have 4,000 names there, I’ve sold about $30,000 of names from your site in the last year. So I think I’ve earned the right to say this for the tenth time publicly,

YOUR REVIEW OF COMMENTS SUCKS!!!

It really does.

I’ve been waiting three days wondering what a bidder is telling me in their comments with the bid. I have no idea. Who knows?

I know last week one evening I placed a comment with a bid that might have been instructive to the other party, but instead of waiting until the comment was reviewed, they canceled the transaction. What if I had said “hey, I’ll give you the .net and ,org and .info for this price too”? I’ve done thatbefore and had the thread canceled. The other party never knew.

This is so stupid, Sedo. I’ve told you over and over to get rid of this. No one likes it. What are you afraid of? Someone might call me poopy pants or something and hurt my feelings? Oh, I know, someone might send off their email to me, to get around the 10% fee. Most people are not like that. And if they wanted to, the contact info is easily found in the Whois record.

I know you only have 35 hours in European work week to think this over. But think! No one likes this. Get rid of it immediately please. We could be losing sales, so you could be losing commissions. In fact, I’m ceratin you are.

Anyone else agree?

Today, I was alerted that others on Namepros were talking about how their comments are going through now too. Until now, I had no idea if it were just me, just a certain level of user, or everyone. Sounds like everyone.

So, hooray for us! And even if Sedo has no clue yet, hooray for them as they will make more money by not losing sales due to miscommunication and time delays.

Now, guys, let’s not screw this up. Be nice in your comments.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, sedo, sedo.com

You know, I often watch with amusement how domainers all follow the same old formula. Overture! Number of web pages! Pagerank! Sure, all that is very important, extremely important. But, that’s not all there is. You have to think differently too. In investing, anyone who does what everyone else does will end up getting clobbered in the end (watch those overpaying on snapnames in a few years).

I look at early trends, future technologies and often buy names that have none of the traditional metrics. I can get them cheap. Hell, sometimes I am able to hand-reg a name and resell it relatively quickly for a large profit.

Here’s a case in point that just happened today: I know that Virtual Worlds, in which people actually work and play, are going to be huge. Look at SecondLife already. Lots of entrepreneurial activity going on there. So, back in July I thought up the word Virtualpreneur. I may have not been the first to think it up, but I was ready to be the first to act on it.

But it had zero OVT, was not a real word and Google Search shows exactly 25 pages that have the term on it. The tlds were available (although now I see that the .biz version is taken and I cannot remember if it was back then or not). All metrics that would steer a traditional domain name investor away from the name were in place. Well, I registered Virtualpreneur.com at for $7 at GoDaddy anyway, on the basis of my perception of the future.

Today, I got an offer for a few hundred dollars on it. I countered with $750 and the buyer immediately took it. I actually should have gone for more. But, that’s over 100 times my money in less than half a year.

I’ve done this before. It’s called thinking, not following.

So, being the virtualpreneur that I am, I immediately went and bought the remaining good TLD’s for the name.

Think. Lead. Don’t follow.

Technorati Tags: domain, domain name, virtual, virtual word, second life, entrepeneur