Welcome to my new website, Name Brief.

I didn't start this new website lightly. An old maxim in the legal business, applicable to all service-related businesses I imagine, is that it's easier to grow your business from a current client than it is to gain a new client. The point being that when you want to grow your business, focus on keeping your current clients happy before you invest significant time in trying to gain new ones. I think some of that wisdom is transferrable to publishing as well. I've had a successful (by my standards) and popular (by yours) weblog for seven years where I've written about ICANN and Internet governance. As ICANN has moved into boring old age though, it's become less and less interesting to follow day to day. For ICANN, this is a good thing. For an ICANN blogger like me, it's absolutely awful. So as my interests have changed, I wanted to do something new with my web writing. The easy thing would have been to simply change my focus on my existing weblog, add a lot of new categories and subpages, and bring all of my icann.Blog readers and subscribers in tow. My sense though was that my new focus would disappoint my old readers while the seven years of ICANN arcana would prevent me from gaining new ones. So rather than litter the old weblog with new categories and new pages, I decided to start a new site. No subscribers. No readers. No built in traffic.

If you're reading this, you're reading from ground zero.

So what's the new focus? As I've been writing about ICANN all these years, the thing that has changed the most, to my eyes, is the domain name industry. ICANN may have spawned registrars and new registries, but what those companies and their customers have done outside of ICANN is truly amazing. This is what Name Brief will cover. How are names bought and sold? How are names used? How are registrants selecting, managing and monetizing their domain names? What tools are out there for users, registrars and resellers? What is the value of a domain name and how is that value measured? Where is the domain name industry headed?

Since I registered my first domain name in 1997, I've registered hundreds of domain names, in ten different TLDs, using at least a dozen different registrars. In the last year, I've purchased many names in the aftermarket, from five different aftermarket vendors, at both fixed prices and at auction, and monetized them with four different advertising services. By no means does this make me an expert -- others have orders of magnitude more experience -- but it is what I'd like to write about now. As I work my way up the learning curve , I want to take you with me. Name Brief won't cover "breaking news" the way I once covered ICANN....or the way other domain news sites cover this industry. Instead, I'm going to focus more on analysis of new services, products, advertising opportunities and uses for domain names. It will be more TechCrunch than Scripting News.

So bookmark this page. Subscribe. Post. Contribute. We have a lot to learn.

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