The National Arbitration Forum has said that a ruling has been issued in favor of alternative rock band Pearl Jam regarding the rights to pearljams.com.

Pearl Jam filed a complaint electronically with the National Arbitration Forum on November 8, 2005, asserting legal rights to the domain name pearljams.com. The address was registered with Domain Systems Inc. by Vertical Axis Inc. on August 25, 2005.

The arbitration panel said that the domain name is confusingly similar to PEARL JAM trademark, which was registered on August 15, 1995 with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The Panel concluded that Vertical Axis Inc. did not have legitimate rights to, or interest in, the disputed Web address, and was using the address in bad faith for its own commercial gain.

National Arbitration Forum Decision

The weekly domain sales report is out at DNJournal.com.

ASB.com were sold for $50,000 at Sedo.com, Sedo also placed two .de's and a double hyphenated .com in the first ten.
#1 - ASB.com - $50,000
#4 - Hausarzt.de - $27,446
#6 - True-To-You.com - $17,272
#9 - AutoAuto.de - $13,723

SnapNames got 4 of the first ten entries:
#2 - TravelPlans.com - $35,472
#3 - AutoShippers.com - $28,251
#5 - CocktailDress.com - $17,750
#10 CanadianGirls.com - $12,750

Afternic.com and Enom's Club Drop also earn a spot on top ten chart:
#7 - QTrip.com - $15,000 - Afternic
#8 - MattressPad.com - $14,100 - Enom's Club Drop

Weekly Domain Name Sales Report

A quote of a message by Monte Cahn, Founder / CEO of Moniker made in DNF:

Be careful with that hijacker. If you have any problem contact Monte.

Google has released its 2005 Year-End Zeitgeist. The Google Zeitgeist is a series of top 10 lists compiled from the most searched terms of 2005.

Janet Jackson tops the list of Google News searches, beating out Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in South Asia:
1. Janet Jackson
2. Hurricane Katrina
3. tsunami
4. xbox 360
5. Brad Pitt
6. Michael Jackson
7. American Idol
8. Britney Spears
9. Angelina Jolie
10. Harry Potter

You can also compare top searches for other subjects such as world affairs, nature, movies, celebrities and phenomena.

Google Zeitgeist '05

Microsoft developers have said that the second beta release of Internet Explorer 7 will provide support for international domain names (IDN). IE will convert the Unicode domain names to Punycode before the name is resolved or send to the proxy.

While IDN compatibility expands the Internet's accessibility for non-English speakers, it also increases the chance of spoofing attacks (IDN homograph attack). That blog entry also details a number of security measures it will put into place to prevent phishing and spoofing attacks.

Users will be able to disable the displaying of IDN domains in Unicode.

Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, has started a blog. He built the first web browser and editor, called WorldWideWeb and the first Web server simply called httpd. The first Web site - http://info.cern.ch/ - was also built by Berners-Lee and was first put online on August 6, 1991.

Berner-Lee says in his first blog entry he found it strange what the World Wide Web became popular as a "publishing medium." Berners-Lee says the popularity of blogs makes him feel that he wasn't off base in thinking that people needed a creative space.

The first post received 455 comments before they had to switch user commenting off.

timbl's blog

Attention Pro Resellers: Each time your customers or you buy a domain from your storefront, they have the option of "parking" their domain. The parked page then serves as a placeholder on the Internet while they decide what to do next with their new domain name.
If you're a Pro Reseller, those pages have been turned into branded space that includes pay-per-click revenue for you. These pay-per-click pages come loaded with advertiser links related to the domain name. Every time a shopper clicks through a parked page, you get 75% of all revenue after the first $50/month.

The problem is most resellers won't reach $50/month, so they will not get any money out of it.

Wild West Domains is a part of the GoDaddy Group (although is a separate registrar, started operating as an ICANN accredited registrar in July 2002). The purpose of WWD is to service domain/hosting resellers.

Afternic.com, a provider of domain name services, announced on Tuesday that it has received acceptance to become a registrar, by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

"Afternic.com long has been one of the central exchanges in the aftermarket purchase and sale of domain names -- it is, and remains, our core business," said Roger Collins, President and CEO of Afternic.com. "We do not foresee that changing in any way and, in fact, believe our new status as ICANN-accredited registrar enhances that standing. Instead, Afternic.com's new designation formalizes our relationship with this all-important governing organization and will enable the company to participate actively -- and at the highest levels -- in key issues and oversight matters regarding the future of domain names."

Collins indicated that its experience in the domain name aftermarket brings key advantages in its new standing as a registrar, such as greater security standards that can reduce credit card fraud and credibility to collaborate on future ICANN-sanctioned aftermarket domain name service offerings.

Afternic.com, based in Orlando, is a leading domain-name exchange and the most recognized name in the secondary domain name industry.

Google has agreed to pay $1 billion to take a 5% share in AOL. AOL is Google's biggest customer, accounting around 10% of Google's revenue. Most of that revenue comes from the ads Google distributes on AOL's Web site. The deal is a stick in the eye against Microsoft, which was also in negotiations to invest in AOL.

The ad deal is important to AOL as it moves from being an Internet service provider to becoming a portal, competing with Microsoft and Yahoo. Part of the deal calls for AOL and Google to work towards making their separate instant messenger services interoperable. That part of the deal is another blow to Microsoft, which hoped to strike a deal with AOL to make its MSN Messenger work with AOL Instant Messenger.

Google Press Release

CNET have compiled a list of the top 10 .com flops. This is a fun trip down memory lane, and food for thought in terms of what didn't work back then, but could work in this new wave of internet growth.

The full list is:
1. Webvan (online grocery shopping and delivery service)
2. Pets.com (supplies for pets)
3. Kozmo (online store and deliverance service)
4. Flooz (an online currency)
5. eToys (online retailer for children's products)
6. Boo.com (online fashion store)
7. MVP.com (sports goods store)
8. Go.com (web portal)
9. Kibu.com (an online community for teenage girls)
10. GovWorks.com (a web site for citizens to do business with municipal government)

msn-cnet.com: Top 10 dot-com flops

Gus, the owner of Argos and Homebase, has acquired shopping comparison site PriceGrabber.com for $485m. PriceGrabber will be incorporated into Gus' Internet division Experian.

PriceGrabber.com has 17 million users in the US where it is based. The site allows shoppers to compare prices on hundreds of thousands of items from more than 9,000 retailers.

Experian has acquired 9 businesses this year, which have helped it to increase profits by 36 per cent.