First came the news from ICANN last week that domain tasting will largely disappear. Not totally, because the practice hasn’t been banned, but it won’t be free anymore. The ICANN Board passed a motion to

include fees for all domains added, including domains added during the AGP,
and encourages community discussion involved in developing the ICANN budget,
subject to both Board approval and registrar approval of this fee.

The AGP is the five-day “Add Grace Period” during which a registrar was not charged the $0.20 ICANN transaction fee (originally intended to cover typos and errors). A reseller usually got a shorter period of grace from the registrar. A few registrars and individual domain tasters took advantage of this period to register tens of millions of speculative domains each month to see if there was any type-in traffic that would be shown AdSense or similar ads. If there was no traffic, the domain name would be cancelled within the AGP at no cost to the registrant.

Now the party is over, with all gTLD transactions to cost $0.25. This won’t stop domain tasting, but it will be severely curtailed.

Google Puts Boot In

While domain tasters were drowning their sorrows in some virtual pub, Google is about to change its AdSense policy before the end of February, reports Jay Westerdal in the DomainTools Blog:

A confidential informant says Google will stop monetizing all domains if they are less than five days old. This potential new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks.

Most domain tasters used AdSense or Yahoo! PPC ads to monetise their temporary assets and they kept the domain if the type-in traffic kept coming and clicking the ads. This means a domain taster will only be watching a visitor counter and not the cash register for the first four days and pay ICANN 25c for the privilege by cancelling before the fifth day ends. Jay believes that Yahoo! will also implement a similar policy.

This is great news for the rest of us. People will buy domain names more thoughtfully and for long-term reasons. Google will regain some of that lost “Do No Evil” cred.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Dan Frommer reports in Alley Insider that Google is testing 2D barcodes in its Google Print Ads for newspapers. This makes a lot of sense, because the URL can be as long as you wish within reason – but long enough to accommodate tracking tags as happens in AdSense ads. Google is using the Kaywa QR format seen on the left (correction and more information in the comment). Nokia uses a different format (right) and my N95 phone can read such code. Both images show the URL of this website. This enables my mobile phone to store a URL very easily and it helps Google and the advertiser to track the success of their campaigns. The QR format seems to better facilitate vertical identification, which might be important when reading a barcode stuck to some object such as a parcel. Vertical orientation would not seem as important in a print ad, which I expect to be oriented correctly.

Would Google want a barcode that can be read easily, regardless of image orientation? Nokia’s site shows T-shirts with barcodes. Where else might Google print ads? On pub coasters? On candy wrappers? Milk cartons?

Popularity: 25% [?]

Good news. A couple of days after I rubbished NotchUp for blocking my access when I mentioned the difficulty of entering a non-US address, they have fixed things. Not just for me, but for all comers outside the US. You no longer need an invitation – just go to www.notchup.com and sign up. It is still in beta.

trainsem.gooruze.com

Popularity: 29% [?]

I wrote this initially as a new forum post after I saw someone being disparaged for saying he is a “Certified SEO Professional”. I don’t believe we should poke fun at someone who claims to be a “certified SEO” or asks about certification offerings.

I see opportunistic charlatans through to some respected names in the industry who offer a certification. Just as a car driver’s licence is a certification but is not an endorsement of expertise, there is a case for SEO certification.

The Need

As a hiring manager, I know that in Melbourne it is next to impossible to advertise for an SEO and get more than one resume from someone who has real SEO experience, that is an in-house SEO role or an SEO agency background.

As a recipient of spam, I know there are numerous individuals and companies who claim to be SEO experts, but their websites show little evidence of this expertise. There are so-called SEO Certification companies who will sell you a certification badge, but again their own website shows little evidence of such knowledge.

There are people who ask about SEO certification, suggesting there is a need.

The Challenge

The usual question is “Who will certify the certifiers?” I don’t think there is a perfect answer, but the history of every profession might reveal a similar dilemma at the beginning. Are we happy to let the SEO profession remain an amorphous cloud?

If you asked within a given context, e.g. Webmasterworld members, who is an expert SEO, you might get a dozen names from anyone you ask and many of the answers would have a common core, say, five individuals.

Do we want a situation where the world has just five experts, certified by acclamation? Are they experts because they have time to display their logical reasoning at length — given that we cannot often see their work in practice?

Then there are other islands of expertise, such as other SEO forums, training companies, and SEM industry associations, who have their own list of experts, certified and otherwise.

What I see happening is similar to a university comparison. There is the Ivy League and then there is the rest, including the School of Hard Knocks. The putative certifying bodies will not go away just because some of us pooh-pooh their product. The self-trained experts will quietly continue to succeed by dint of their own effort. Some of these certifying entities will do a great job of marketing their Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval stamps and employers will begin to look for this Seal in resumes.

The Barriers

The main barrier is ego. Look at any person who rubbishes SEO certification. Has he positioned himself as an expert, say, by operating an SEO business? Has he convinced himself that he is really good because his projects have all been resounding successes? Therefore, he may feel no need to be certified. Is he threatened by a growing number of newbies clutching their certifications?

The other barrier is a lack of cohesion. Relatively few SEOs join SEO associations – for a variety of valid reasons, particularly when they work for their own websites and not for clients. While they do not need a certification, are they saying that they do not need formal SEO training, where the certificate is merely an outcome? If they were starting today, would they prefer the trial-and-error path that most of us have endured in our early days, until we found Webmasterworld?

Is there anything we can do to influence this outcome? Please comment.

Popularity: 61% [?]

NotchUp is a new recruitment site that is currently in beta, but you need to be invited to get in. You supposedly get paid to be interviewed. How much? You supply your current salary into a calculator, e.g. $150,000 works out to $630. Yeah, right.

I got an invite and imported my LinkedIn profile and connections. Great idea, but NotchUp isn’t the first to do this. The first hiccup for me is that it wouldn’t take a 4-digit postcode and there was no field for the country. Typical American form design, I thought, so I added a zero, giving myself a location perhaps in New England, except that 03030 doesn’t exist.

Helpfully, I wrote to NotchUp and suggested that they should open up to international applicants given the LinkedIn import facility and to fix the form. I invited about 200 of my LinkedIn connections, as I will supposedly get 10% of their first year’s salary if they find a new job through NotchUp. Sweet. I can imagine that some of the LinkedIn stalwarts may never need to work again.

I heard back from Customer Support:

Thank you for your interest in NotchUp. We are currently accepting registrations from the United States only. We are looking forward to expanding our site worldwide, and we expect that to happen during the first half of 2008. We hope you will check back with us.

To add insult to injury, my login has now been disabled. What a waste of time for me and others who may meet the same fate!

LinkedIn has a very powerful recruitment backend that isn’t well-known to ordinary mortals and I get the occasional enquiry from recruiters owing to this. USAns, do you think NotchUp’s model will work? With the exception of some highly specialised occupations, I can’t see this model working for the bulk of the population.

The LinkedIn profile import facility is a double-edged sword. If I were an employer who liked a profile in NotchUp and didn’t want to pay to proceed, I would simply use Google to search for a unique sentence and find the person’s LinkedIn profile.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Recently, while I was in the US, an Indian friend asked me to buy him an iPhone because they can be unlocked in India (or elsewhere, if you know how). I did some hunting and found out that this is quite a hot topic. There is a lot of speculation online and quite a few Made-for-Adsense sites with nothing other than the iPhone name in an article, but there are some gems in there.

iPhone India Edition – Hidden Features is quite a funny read. It has a PhotoShopped picture of an iPhone with features such as “GPMS – Gutter and Pothole Management System”.

There are some posts that allege to show how to unlock an iPhone – take them all with a pinch of salt, as you could end up with an expensive paperweight if something goes wrong:

• iPhone India
• iPhone Elite

Buying an Unlocked iPhone

If I were lusting after an unlocked iPhone, I’d be looking at Apple Germany or France, where Apple has been forced to sell unlocked units. T-Mobile has them for €399 on a plan, and unlocked units were selling for about $1480 for a while until the courts gave T-Mobile the right to sell only locked ones. In France, you can still get unlocked models for €749. But if you are in India, your current options are:

• Palika Bazaar or Sarojini Nagar in Delhi
• Heera Panna in Mumbai

The going grey-market price is about $650 (Rs 30,000).

Will an iPhone Work in India?

Locked or unlocked, the iPhone will work in India because it has four GSM bands, two of which work in India (900 and 1800 MHz). All you have to do is ensure that your carrier supports roaming in India. Unlocking also depends on the firmware supplied with the phone – the latest version apparently cannot be unlocked, so don’t upgrade an unlocked phone. Here is someone who got his phone working in India:

iPhone Unlocking Jargon

• iPhone Elite = A set of tools that can brick your iPhone if you don’t know what you are doing.
• iPhone SimFree = A GUI-based unlocking tool that worked with firmware 1.1.2 but the site hasn’t been updated since November 20.
• iBrickr = A ringtone management tool for older firmware – don’t try it on 1.1.1 or later.
• Unlocking = Allowing the phone to use a SIM from any carrier, not just the one that sold you the phone on a contract.
• Jailbreaking = Allowing you to access all parts of the SIM’s file system.
• Activating = Conversely, this means bypassing the activation step via iTunes.
• Re-virginizing = Restoring the iPhone’s lock table if damaged by an anySIM 1.0x unlocker.
• Turbo SIM = Czech company Bladox sells this SIM-sized chip that slips in with your SIM and does amazing things, including unlocking the iPhone (acc to Wikipedia, but contradicted by the website). Their site says that as of 17 December 2007, a tsunami hit their shop, so they are closed. This probably means that most of Western Europe is under water by now…

Unlocking Just Got Harder

Firmware 1.1.3 was confirmed at Macworld 2008. It can’t be unlocked with AnySIM, so life for users of unlocked iPhones just got harder.

Popularity: 58% [?]