February 2005
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of February 2005.
The BBC reports that the European Software Patents has been rejected by the European Parliament. The parliament can now request the European Commission to submit the widely despised law to another round of consultation. There is a major opposition to software patents in Europe and it seems that the main backers of the now rejected legislation are US companies rather than European software companies. The European Commission must now consider the request and it is not known if they will approve it as The Register pointed out.
Written by John McCormac on February 17th, 2005 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.
An article in the Irish Times technology section by Robin O’Brien-Lynch stirred up a storm of controversy in the Irish blogosphere. Unlike the usual Irish Times technology section article, this one was relevant to technologists and to the general public. And it marked a turning point - an Irish Times journalist actually answered questions and explained an article. Most of the time, the Irish Times technology section goes unnoticed by the web because of the Pay Per View subscription model that the Irish times introduced a few years ago. On the web, only the Irish Times subscribers can see the article. However it was one of the most commented upon tech articles of recent years. It was pushed out of the limelight by another Irish Times controversy. The Irish Times technology section is a one to two page section that appears in the Irish Times newspaper business supplement on Fridays.
According to Robin O’Brien-Lynch, the concept of the article was to see how American political advocacy via blogs could be applied to an Irish General Election. The US Presidential Election was concerned with the election of a president. An Irish General Election, by comparison, has many local aspects at play. And with local aspects comes local politics. That means local blogging with potentially small audiences. It is the kind of article that fits in well with the Irish Times technology section. But from an editorial point of view, the article was flawed as it was trying to compare two very different events. The title for the article “Lots of Irish blogs but few talking about Irish matters” was wrong as well but that was a case of poor editing rather than journalistic inaccuracy.
The Irish Times technology section is in a peculiar position - it is essentially a magazine within a supplement within a newspaper. The old model was that the newspapers reported the news and the magazines did the analysis. That was the old model - the highly competitive market means that a newspaper has to try and cover the analysis market, the opinion market, the news side of the market and product placement/review. The Irish Times technology section does not really cover the news side of things - that is more of a daily issue and technology news has to fight for space with other, more important news. It has bought in news items from Reuters. It has a high-profile techie column from Danny O’Brien of Need To Know fame. It has a weekly column, “Net Results”, from Karlin Lillington. The rest is generic Irish news and commentary that does not make it into the daily newspaper.
Bernie Goldbach makes some very interesting observations on O’Brien-Lynch’s article and as yet, the comments posted on various blogs by O’Brien-Lynch don’t go far enough in addressing them. But they provide enough starting points for a few good articles for the Irish Times and it would be very interesting to see if O’Brien-Lynch will be allowed to follow them up in a series of articles.
The blogosphere has evolved almost in parallel with the normal web. The normal Irish web is business orientated and on search engines, these sites tend to dominate the search results often at the expense of blogs.
The IT article is wrong in considering the Irish blogosphere as being in its infancy. Prior to the advent of blogging software, many bloggers would have had their own personal websites. The blogging software enabled them to update their sites more efficiently than publishing every update with a copy of Frontpage. Many of these sites would have been personal sites on ISPs or free webhosting. Many of these personal websites would never have appeared high in the search results either. That critical evolutionary leap was missed in the article.
The dismissal of the “blogroll” and “who’s reading me” is revealing. Is a newspaper’s obsession with sales figures any less neurotic? Why does the IT include pictures of its columnists? Why should anyone consider the opinion of an Irish Times columnist to be better or worse than that of others? Unlike the bland figures of a sales report, the “who’s reading me” section indicates real readers as opposed to sales.
But more importantly blogging changes the balance of technology journalism. Which would you rate higher - the opinion of a technologist on technology or the opinion of someone with little or no technological background? Many technologists have blogs and comment lucidly and accurately on trends in technology but their blogs are often not about technology in general.
There is something quite terrifying at the heart of blogging for journalists - it provides real feedback from the audience beyond the usual stuff that appears in the “letters to the editor” page. It makes journalists answerable and it can be quite a reality check for columnists to have their mistakes highlighted and their articles questioned. Prior to the web and blogging, a one way process. Blogging added the missing element and changed journalism into a conversation with the reader. FMK explores this change.
What limited the impact of the Irish Times’ blogging article was that the IT is a subscription site - had it been a publically accessible site, the impact and commentary would probably have been greater. Despite this limited readership, the article was quoted all over the Irish blogsphere. O’Brien-Lynch referred to the insularity and backslapping nature of the Irish blogosphere. But this is a case of a journalist completely misunderstanding the nature of the web and blogging. The web is not a newspaper. It is a complex, interlinked set of sites. The blogosphere is a set of conversations in asynchronous time.
A few weeks ago, I read an interesting paper on journalism during the dot.bomb period. In it, one web journalist claimed that reader feedback beyond the usual corrections should not be allowed. One of the recent additions on that site was a blog. Ironically it is probably the most genuine and original content on that site. Blogs and their readership act as a quality filter where like-minded people can provide interesting ideas and commentary and pointers. The danger of blogging for journalists, especially those covering technology, is that they are surplus to requirements it is possible to get the information often from people who are the real experts. It is that democratisation of journalism that is a far bigger story than whether US political advocacy methods can be applied to Ireland.
Written by John McCormac on February 17th, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Tech Commentary.
It is ironic that in the month that the Media Lab Europe went into liquidation, Yahoo announced that it was to set up a European base in Dublin. The operation will employ 400 people and will be based in Dublin’s East Point industrial estate/business park. Dublin is now the home to European operations of Google, Ebay, Paypal. Overture. The Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment is very happy with the whole deal.
Written by John McCormac on February 15th, 2005 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.
The Register reports that Nominet, the UK ccTLD registry has won a legal action against Peter Francis-Macrae and his company Ultra Technologies Ltd. Domain owners would be more familiar with Francis-Macrae’s “Domain Registry Services” and the fake renewal/pseudo invoice scam. The .uk WHOIS had apparently been datamined by Francis-Macrae and his companies and bogus renewal/pseudo invoices were sent out to .uk registrants. The court also ordered Francis-Macrae to pay £81,000 and damages are to be decided at a separate hearing.
Written by John McCormac on February 12th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on News Bytes.
The move by Google to become a domain registrar has been the subject of a lot of speculation. A lot of the theory revolved around Google getting access to the soon to expire list of domain names that registrars have access to. This list would apparently allow Google to integrate the expired domains with its Page Rank system and automatically reduce or eliminate the PR of expired domains. There is a catch with this.
Domains do not expire and get deleted immediately. The deletion process can take approximately 45 days. During that period, it is possible for the domains to be be reactivated by the registrar on behalf of the registrant. However by integrating its existing webcache with an expiry detection that detects both the nameservers and IP of the website, it may just work.
There is another possibility. The US search market has been shifting more towards the local search side of things. While Google, Yahoo and MSN have been concentrating on the macro-search side of the market, there is a lot of activity on the local search end of the market. It is too early in the game to identify an actual winner and Google’s position is by no means assured. The position of being a registrar would give Google access to valid WHOIS data. And that data could be used to improve local search because the address of the registrant often identifies the local market of the website - something invaluable for a local search operation. But Google does not have significant market presence in the domain business.
It would be possible for Google to put a patchy version of the WHOIS for all com/net/org/biz/info domains together. Many registrars sell copies of their bulk WHOIS data for marketing purposes. It would be simpler for Google to purchase the data from other registrars. However the quality of WHOIS data varies considerably. In some cases it is intentionally wrong. Obscured domain ownership details are also a problem as is bulk WHOIS opt-out. And a set of data assembled like this would still exclude the Country Code Top Level Domains (cctlds). The UK and Germany would be the biggest European cctlds. The data privacy laws in Europe are stricter and access to cctld WHOIS data is not as free.
The easy entry for Google would be to purchase one of the significant players in the domain name business. Google becoming a registar could be the war dance prelude to the acquisition of one of the existing large registrars. The alternative would be for Google to grow a domain name registration business. In a mature market, this would be a very difficult task. One even more left-field possibility is that Google may one day intend to run a gTLD.
Written by John McCormac on February 12th, 2005 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Search Engines and Domains And Statistics.
For the first time in a long time, the Esat has lost more domains than Eircom. The net results for Eircom seem to have improved over January 2005. During 2004, Eircom was losing hundreds of domains each month. It seems that a lot of that was Eircom cleaning off non-paying domains from its nameservers. Esat is in a worse position. Despite it being the second Irish ISP, it never was quite the competition that Eircom required.
The competition that proved the most damaging to Eircom was the rise of the Hosting Service Providers (HSPs). These are pure web plays - businesses whose primary business is hosting rather than connectivity. They now handle the bulk of the Irish hosting business. The traditional early market hosters, (ISPs like Eircom, Esat, Netsource etc) now only represent 28.61% of the Irish market. The top 25 HSPs in Ireland represent 49.59% of the Irish market. The biggest Irish hoster is Hosting365.ie at a main market share of 12.11% based on its nameservers. The second biggest is Eircom.net with 9.76% of the market. Esat has 8.58% of the market.
The main work that WhoisIreland.com does is analysing domain name statistics. Each month it generates a report on domain name statistics and movements over approximately 700,000 hosters worldwide. It also generates a detailed analysis of Irish hosters each month covering the ie/com/net/org/biz/info domains hosted on approximately 850 Irish hosters. These reports show that the Irish market is still a very fragmented one despite the growth of the HSP section of the market. A lot of this is down to the slow roll out of broadband and the high cost of .ie domains.
Many of the bigger HSPs have more com/net/org/biz/info domains than .ie domains. However the pattern is inverted with Eircom and Esat. Eircom accounts for 12.46% of the entire .ie cctld. Esat accounts for 7.96% of the .ie cctld. Hosting365.ie only has 5.26% of the .ie cctld but has approximately 15.54% of the Irish hosted com/net/org/biz/info market.
Written by John McCormac on February 11th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
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