Archive: April, 2010

In the last few years, the number of Russian Internet users has grown significantly. In 2004, according to a survey by Global Reach, there were just 22 million Russians using the Internet, while in 2008, the Russian Network Information Center said the number had grown to 34 million people. Today there is currently around 45 million Internet users in Russia and approximately two million country-specific domain names.

Russia has registered it’s national Cyrillic domain as .??, with ICANN which stands for “Russian Federation”.

These cyrillic characters translate to the Latin alphabet characters “rf” and according to the Russian Federation, they have become the first country in the world to launch a Cyrillic domain  with the “.??,” characters.

Russia’s Coordination Center for the National Internet Domain, which administered the process, said ICANN’s decision was the final step towards the creation of the Russian-language domain. Russian is purported to be the ninth most popular language among Internet users with approximately 38 million native speaking internet users.

They feel that all bureaucratic obstacles have now been overcome in the creation of the Russian-language domain. Both the principal and the physical delegation of the domain has been approved according to all accounts.

Somewhat in a shroud in mystery, Google has unveiled new functionality in their webmaster tools which is an update to the Top Search Queries section.

Without any fanfare or media blast, they have overnight seemingly revolutionized the way we can view and sort data in their Google Webmaster Tools application.

Some believe this is a fluke that Google would do this as its almost inconceivable that something so useful and transparent has been made readily available.

Admittedly, its somewhat like having the teacher’s test book at school.

Some of the changes and initial impressions are as follows:

First, the new Top Search Queries report is seemingly just a Google Analytics looking graph at first glance.

However, this graph plots your impressions and click throughs over a given period of time, and while this is not really a big improvement, what is under the graph starts to show the difference.

Under the graph is a much more detailed report that reflects impressions, click throughs, click through rate by query,  query’s position in the search results and also the click through landing page of a given search result.

Internet gambling has been and continues to be a fantastic money making venture online.

Gambling by its very nature favors the house, so the even the Internet “house” is usually into profit from the minute the site starts working.

In recent news however, gambling and the world wide web have not been getting along so well.

Best Odds Corp. of Las Vegas, who owns macpokeronline.com, is suing Michael Jackness, who owns competing Web sites macpoker.com and macpoker.net.

This entire dispute arises over the use of MAC POKER and the ensuing customer confusion and accompanying look and feel disagreements.

Best has owned the MAC POKER mark since approximately June 3, 2005, and they claim that since January of 2009, Jackness has been infringing on Best’s service mark MAC POKER with his site.

Not to be outdone, the Commonwealth of Kentucky filed a lawsuit against “Pocket Kings” who own Full Tilt Poker in a bid to recover losses by Kentucky residents in online gaming.

This is not the first time in court over this issue. Back in September of 2008, the Commonwealth of Kentucky sought the forfeiture of 141 internet gambling domain names, including those belonging to the industry giants Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars.

Last month, Utah passed its own statewide anti-cybersquatting law.

This has happened in the wake of recent initiatives in the internet world where entities are trying to set jurisdiction forescalation and enforcement. Recently, California has been in the forefront on that issue thanks to Verisign and its long history in that state.

However, and moving East a bit, Utah is taking some of that limelight.

The new Utah law provides for the following: First, It is purported to increase the benchmarks of financial damages for which a cybersquatter can be sued.

Financial deterrents seem to be a good route to pursue, except for when you consider the case of the young Australian man who uploaded a Nintendo game title pre-release date and was convicted under similar intellectual property laws, which levied a hefty fine that he will be paying for the rest of his life.

At his current level of employment and yearly earnings, he will never pay his debt over his lifetime.

A victory, yes, but I don’t know if Nintendo is so sure after their own legal expenses. That is not to say that the punishment is not effective, but a fine to those who are broke is not much of a deterrent.