10 things you never new about dot com

Internet's most popular domain name dotcom (.com) has turned 25! The domain of Internet's most successful companies Google, eBay, Amazon has through the years shaped World Wide Web what it is today.

Short for 'commercial', the .com extension was initially intended to be used for ecommerce websites. However, over the years, the domain has been in use for any and every type of site, from business to blogs to personal websites.

As the .com celebrates its 25th birthday, here are 10 interesting facts about the domain.

1. Twenty five years ago, on March 15, 1985, the first commercial dotcom company Symbolics.com was born. It was one of the six dotcoms registered in 1985.

2. In 2009, Symbolics.com was sold to XF.com Investments. The current Symbolics web site is available at symbolics-dks.com. XF.com is a commercial real estate and investment site.

3. Before the domain name .com was finalised, .cor was the top runner for corporation names. The .com was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by VeriSign.

4. Any guesses on the number of .coms today? Of the current 250 million websites, a whopping 80 million are .coms.

5. Between 1985 and 2000, over 21 million domain names were registered. 57 million domain names were registered between 2000 and 2010. The .com domain initially saw a slow pick up with mere 100 .com domain names registered two and a half years after the first .com was registered.

6. During Internet boom in 1997, .com count reached the one millionth number.

7. You thought dotcom bust of 2000, which saw large number of dotcoms of all sizes crumbling like nine pins, stole the domain's scorching growth march? Not really! In the year 2000 too, the number of dotcoms grew by a monthly average of 668,000 globally.

8. Ever wondered which is the .com with the longest name? It is: http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com. The domain name belongs to a Welsh village.

9. Which is the world's most expensive .com? No, it is not sex.com despite the huge number of takers for porns on Internet. The world's most expensive .com is insure.com. In 2009, the site was bought for a whopping $16 million by QuintStreet. Presently, the site offers life insurance, auto insurance, health insurance and other policies.

10. Before 2009, sex.com held the title for the world's most expensive .com domain having got sold for $14 million in 2006. At No 3 & 4 are Fund.com, which got sold for $9.99 million in 2008 and Porn.com, which got sold for $9.5 million in 2007.

The most popular words used in domain names are home (1.2 million), online (one million), and land (891,000), according to VeriSign.

Today, nearly 53 billion requests for websites including .com are logged every day.

World's first ten dotcom names were sold between March 1985 to March 1986. Below are the top ten in order...

Symbolics.com (March 15, 1985),
BBN.com (April 24, 1985),
Think.com (May 24, 1985),
MCC.com (July 11, 1985),
DEC.com (Sept. 30, 1985),
Northrop.com (Nov. 7, 1985),
Serox.com (Jan. 9, 1986),
SRI.com (Jan. 17, 1986),
HP.com (March 3, 1986) and
Bellcore.com (March 5, 1986).

According to a new ITIF study, the dotcom domain has become the platform for $400 billion in annual economic activity, a number that is expected to rise to $950 billion by 2020.

E-com has been one of the major driving force in the popularity of dotcom. According to the report, 11.9 million are e-commerce and online business sites, 4.3 million are entertainment sites and there are 3.1 million finance-related sites and 1.8 million sports sites.

Courtesy: http://infotech.indiatimes.com/

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Password Security and Hacks

Are you aware about your Password Security?

If not then this is probably the time to think about it in a serious manner. According to a study conducted the top ten most used passwords were:

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

"Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today's world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second-or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes," said Amichai Shulman, Imperva's chief technical officer.

"Employees using the same passwords on Facebook that they use in the workplace bring the possibility of compromising enterprise systems with insecure passwords, especially if they are using easy to crack passwords like '123456'," he added.
It is time before you should realize its importance. With the growth of social services and applications getting you busy, we should mange it with utmost care.

Ref: http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20100121/854/ttc-the-ten-most-commonly-used-internet.html

Here are top 10 ways to best use your password.

1. Create a password with minimum six characters.
2. Use combination of characters and numbers
3. Don’t use generic passwords like password, mypassword or password123
4. Keep changing your passwords every week.
5. Don’t keep the same password for all your application
6. You can maintain a diary or a notepad to preserve your passwords
7. If possible always connect it to another account
8. For email accounts always use security question and its answer that only you are aware.
9. Never share your password with anyone.
10. Don’t store your password online.

Waiting for your comments and suggestions.

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PeopleRank Your Online Reputation

Are you famous enough?

PeopleRank

PageRank (Google), TrustRank (Yahoo) and now PeopleRank (WebMii). PeopleRank or public information about you is no more a vanity. People don’t search for their own information on the web just for the sake of it anymore, the whole idea is to find out how much popular he/she is on the World Wide Web. The resultant factor is to get a brand name for you. WebMii conglomerates data from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Yahoo Search and other search engine to provide you with a picture of your image on the internet. However, there are some restrictions. They have country specific searches like USA, France, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, United Kingdom and International as a category.

Public Profile Results Page (PPRS) as coined by me is something that have evolved over the time and I am sure people will be going crazy over this just like they did the same for twitter.

The PPRS have lots of sections namely Tags, Photos (powered by Facebook, Bing), Email, Facebook Profile, Hi5 Profile, Twitter, MySpace, Websites (powered by Yahoo) and Blogs (powered by Google) which contributes to the overall PeopleRank.

The time factor shown up in the right hand side can be assumed as being proud to conglomerate the data in such a short time.

Looks Good right!

Now, give a hawk eyes to the way the data is being manipulated. Let’s take an example. You have a low PeopleRank and now as you have come across this term you want to work on it. Here are few tips to improve it.

1. Increase you Facebook interaction
2. Name your images and upload as many variations as you want.
3. Tags even though powered by Google, I believe they involve Tagged info as well.
4. Make good use of your friends and connections at LinkedIn
5. If you have a blog it’s all the more advantageous to build your brand.
6. Make sure you have your name as the original name for most of these applications otherwise the whole effort is wasted.


Advantages :

• Most of the employers now seek online information pertaining to the candidate before even actually checking for references.
• The better information you have promoted for yourself the better it is for the yourself in terms of social gathering, online meetings.
• It may develop into a mania of checking your online reputation every now and then.
• Most of them are free applications, website thus the only thing you need to invest is time.
• Get famous – though with time.

Disadvantages:

• Be aware that your reputation is at stake when you expect bad comments for your profile.
• Most people are unaware of their public profile and even when they come to know about it … it might be too late.
• Online Reputation Management is a tough task, it involves a lot of time and logic.
• Make sure you don’t add your competitor in your circle, otherwise it may prove demeaning for your profile.

I am waiting for your comments now. Do comment on this post but please do not make comments merely for the sake of seo benefits by putting links through un relevant anchor texts.

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Google Docs New Update

Google Docs has come up with new improved features for Drawings and Forms, which will surely help users in several ways.

Google has made it easier for users to build flowcharts. It has introduced 20 absolutely new and unique shapes for the standard flowchart components. Not only that, users can enjoy more control over drawing text layout as they are now supported with line break options. The line break options are available in text boxes as well as within shapes. Users can access these features simply by inserting the desired drawing into any spreadsheet, document or presentation.

My suggestions to Google would be to introduce:

1. Connectors and
2. Multiple arrow/endpoint options

This would really make it awesome. What is your opinion?

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Kolkata Bloggers Meet 2009

Kolkata Blogger Meet is scheduled to be held on the 8th of August, 2009. The very fact that this is the first of its type to be held in Kolkata excites me. I expect to meet lot of my friends here who have established themselves as great seo guys.

I do hope that this comes out to be one of the many initiatives that we plan for the future.

All the best to the Coordinators. Will update my blog and Twitter with the conversations.

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Is Youtube worth its brand ?

Is Google Earning or Losing Money with YouTube?

Analysts, reporters and other spectators keep on brining up the issue of how much money Google is actually losing on YouTube? Or whether they can afford it or not? But it seems that the lingering question that mostly affects the Internet marketers is that – what will happen if Google actually admits that they cannot afford it? If you are using YouTube as a marketing platform then should you be worried? Well, to think about it, no one actually knows how much YouTube costs Google or the exact amount of the revenue that it brings in.

Considering the overall cost, which includes the cost of storage, servers and bandwidth for streaming huge amount of video files over the Web, it is likely that YouTube costs Google more than they had expected when it started off. On the other hand, in case of the popularity of YouTube among worldwide video watchers has exactly been what Google had expected. But, Google has overlooked the fact that YouTube would also appeal to the advertisers, whose money equivalents the costs. Advertisers generally have been keener on getting their ads side-by-side with a service showing Hollywood videos rather than getting it placed on the sides of amateur contents.

Despite the fact that they have not yet found out the right formula, Google, however continues to squeeze in its offering. But the question is how long Google will be able to support this loss? Will they continue to bear the cost until they find the right formula? Google, as most people believe can afford to lose this amount of money for a while. But what nobody knows is that whether the company is ready to do it or not.

YouTube apparently seemed to be a huge advertising success – at least that’s what most people, including Google expected, as videos are probably the most popular form of media. On top of that YouTube offers to host videos for absolutely free. So, the question is what could probably resist the advertisers from getting tempted? Whatever the reason maybe, it seems that advertisers have indeed made YouTube a huge disappointment for Google.

On the contrast listing off other free content plays like Gmail, Google Docs and the upcoming Google Wave has never occurred in anybodies mind so far. Actually they were never expected to disappoint Google.

If Google remains a bit more patient and change its attitude about YouTube, then in the long-run the company can emerge as the leader in video and eventually figure out a way to utilize YouTube as the ideal advertising platform and also find out a way to make money out of it.

So, if you use YouTube for marketing purpose, don’t worry! Keep yourself focused and continue to do so. For backup, you can always post your videos to Vimeo and other sites – just incase.

Shoot your queries to SEO Kolkata

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All New Yahoo Homepage

Yahoo doing more research to attract visitors

After months of speculations and wait, finally the new and improved Yahoo Homepage for the web users was launched two days ago. It is something that web users have been waiting for quite a long time now. However, Yahoo announced that for the time being, the site will have both the old and new homepage and will probably be featuring an opt-in choice for interested users.
The new homepage is by far much neater and less cluttered as it consists of lesser buttons and modules. Not only that, even the search option on the page seems to be more prominent. Search, in the new design has been integrated into the other parts of the page making it more visible.

Unlike the older homepage, the left column of Yahoo properties, which was a static list, now, has been modified into a customizable menu that transforms into an RSS reader or a dashboard. In the new design, users will also be benefited with the option of adding or removing applications to and from their Yahoo homepages according to their preferences. Even when Yahoo has created a wide variety of widgets to be launched, users are allowed to add any third-party site that has RSS feed capabilities. This has open up a whole new horizon for third-party developers, as they can now add their own created applications to the gallery.

Yahoo executive, Tapan Bhat stated that the company will recommend widgets to the users on the basis of their individual browsing and click-stream behavior. Adding and removing applications from the homepage is not only simple but can be done with just one single click. For example, when a user takes the mouse over the “My Favorites” application, a new window will open, which will not only allow him to see the site but will allow him to view the content as well.

On the right hand side of the window, a new and relevant (contextually) ad unit is placed, which can be used to target the content of the page itself. Yahoo, while explaining this feature gave the example of a movie opening targeting users who look up for movie show times from one of Yahoo’s native movies application.

The new sliding fun-to-serious scale is one of the many amazing and useful features that have been added to the new homepage. This feature will help users to adjust the news they view on their personalized Yahoo homepage. Yahoo further plans to start off with a new look and feel for search results that will inform users about the latest happenings on the homepage itself.
However, U.S web users will be first ones to experience the new Yahoo homepage, as it is about to be released first across U.S and then in UK, India, France and other countries respectively.

Please ask your question to SEO Kolkata

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