The .me domain name is off to a great start with over 30,000 domain name applications received to date, the domain name company has announced. The country’s extension - whose slogan is “.me is about YOU!” holds a lot of value due to the potential for personalization.

The company announced that the next round of registration, functioning on a first-come, first-serve basis, would start on July 17, during which all available domains would be awarded to the first bidders that meet required conditions. 

The General Sunrise Period began in May, when only trademark owners could have applied for their .me domain. .me domain names that receive more than one application will be awarded through an auction process. .me is expected to be utilized as a personalized Web address and as a catchy business marketing tool around the world. The .me Landrush (pre-registration) period began in early June, and Open Registration is set to begin on a first-come, first-served basis in mid-July. Two-year minimums are required on all .me domain names registered during the Landrush and initial Open Registration periods.

Open registration of the domain names, on a first-come, first-served basis will stat on 17 of his month.

More than 80 different accredited registrars from 24 countries are receiving the applications.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet global regulatory body, has announced that just anything, anywhere including individuals and commodities can now apply for and obtain a top level domain name. Before, securing an Internal domain name was a long and painful process. But ICANN rose from its yearly general meeting in Paris, France, with a full liberalisation of the Internet in order to make it available, accessible to many more people. Specifically, all bottlenecks associated with such registration in the past have been removed. It will be a free for all from now and there will be no language or cultural barriers. But henceforth, registration by such domain names will attract a fee of $100,000.

The decision was based on its stockholder’s worldwide, consultation. Scripts other than Latin which were not originally permitted on the Internet could now make free inroads into the information superhighway. These languages include, but are not limited to, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Cyrillic. If this sails through, the Internet will now be more accessible to people in the Middle East and Asia.

Until now top-level domain names— the .com or .uk at the end of a web address — have been restricted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the international not-for-profit body set up in 1998 to to oversee the structure of the internet and maintain its stability. Icann regulates the way web addresses are assigned to ensure that computers can communicate with each other.

The free-for-all agreed in Paris yesterday is seen as a great leap forward akin to the privatisation of telecommunications in the Thatcher era. Icann is not being forced to act because of there are not enough name options, but because it wants to open up the system to increase consumer choice.

Most web addresses in Britain have the suffix .uk. The most popular top level domain name in the world is .com and there are about another 20 possibilities such as .org or .net. Every country has a country code domain name such as .de (Germany) and .fr (France). Now the possibilities are endless and the new names could range from place names to commodities.

Paul Twomey, the chief executive of Icann, said: “It’s a massive increase in the real estate of the internet. It will allow groups, communities and businesses to express their identities online.”

Mozilla have release Firefox 3 on Tuesday night, and the open source project is opening a new front in web browser wars. Firefox 3 will be the first internet browser to offer offline web application support. Despite repeated server crashes, it looks like the new Firefox 3 web browser is on a roll.

As of Wednesday morning, the day after the latest version of Firefox 3 was released, more than 7.9 million copies of the software had been downloaded.

The crush of demand made access to the new software spotty for much on Tuesday after its debut. But by Wednesday, new copies of the software were being downloaded at a rate of 5,523 per minute.

Mozilla is pushing to set a record for more software downloaded in a 24-hour period, and it’s clear Mozilla is set to beat that goal, in addition to surpassing its own target of more than 5 million downloads over that period. Mozilla said it’s waiting for the Guinness Book of World Records to review the results.

Of course, it’s easy to dismiss the rush to download the new software as hype. The open-source software has been available in various beta forms since 2007, and none of its new features have been kept under wraps.

New features of Firefox 3

Enhanced bookmarking abilities and security features are main themes for Firefox 3, the Mozilla-backed open source Web browser. The new browser will also sport a slightly new look. Makers of the software, many whom have volunteered their efforts for free, hope to set a world record for the most downloads in a single day when the final version of Firefox 3 goes live next Tuesday.

Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new “Places” feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven’t bookmarked.

There’s also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list — similar to what’s already available on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 browser.

Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn’t disrupt the log-in process.

The new features of Firefox 3 include the following:

Personal

• Library

• Tags

• Smart Location Bar

• One-Click Bookmarking

• Smart Bookmark Folders

Security & Privacy

• Instant Web Site ID

• Anti-Malware

• Parental Controls

• Anti-Virus Software

• Clear Private Data

• Customized Security Settings

• Add-ons

• Automated Update

• Password Manager

• Anti-Phishing

• Pop-Up Blocker

Customization

• Add-ons Manager

• Over 5,000 ways to customize

• Browser Look & Feel

• Beyond Add-ons

Productivity

• Platform-Native Look & Feel

• Feed Reader

• Download Manager

• Spell Checking

• Session Restore

• Full Zoom

• Image Loading

Search

• Smart Keywords

• Search Suggestions

• Integrated Web Search

• Hundreds of Search Engines

• Find

Tabs

• Tabs

• Reopen Closed Tabs

• Drag & Reorder Tabs

• Smooth Scrolling

• Save on Exit

Universal Access

• Universal Customization

• The Language of Firefox

• Emphasis on Accessibility

• Improved Text Rendering

Performance

• Improved Memory Management

• Smaller Memory Footprint

• Faster JavaScript

• Graphics Engine Improvements

• Faster Page Load

Standards

• Online Application Support

• Color Profile Support

• Advanced Graphics

• Support for Advanced Web Technologies

• Offline Browsing

Help

• Live Support

• Firefox Support

You can read the details information of the new features of Firefox 3 here: [URL=http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features/#instant-id]Read More [/URL]

And you can download Firefox 3 from here: [URL=http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/]Download Firefox 3[/URL]

Collective Development
Firefox is the No. 2 web browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It comes from Mozilla an open source community in which thousands of people, mostly volunteers, collectively develop free products. Mozilla has been developing Firefox 3 for nearly three years and has been publicly testing it since November for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

There was recently a buzz regarding the web 2.0 award held by Seomoz.org after which the PR7 page got completely de-indexed from Google and the PR7 changed to a complete gray bar. First there was no reason that strongly could hold the answer for it, but then the SEO’s after some research could just conclude that it was the “0″ ending in the URL that led to the penalty.

Then Jane from Seomoz had kept in touch with Google and they have finally come to a conclusion that URL ending with a “0″ will not be in the index of Google and that’s why the web 2.0 awards pages were penalized. Rand got in touch with Google and was advised that changing the URL so it doesn’t end in “.0″ would be a wise decision. Google would prefer not to make an official or public comment about this issue. After a lot of investigation by SEO, it was found that it’s not just inadvisable, but literally impossible to get a URL indexed in Google’s engine if it ends with a .0 similar to how Google won’t index file extensions ending in .exe, .dll or .tgz

Later on, Matt Cutts reported in is blog, that they finally allow and crawling pages with 0 ending URLs.
Here is what Matt says and I coat -

“Even though urls ending in “.0? are often binary and therefore end up getting dropped later in our indexing pipeline, it’s always good to revisit old decisions and respond to feedback by running new tests. So just in the last day or so, we switched it so that Google is willing to crawl pages that end in in “.0?. This will help the small number of pages out on the web that want to serve up HTML pages with a “.0? extension.

- An easy was to use the filetype: operator, so that you can decide whether to avoid a particular filename extension yourself.
- Google is willing to revisit old decisions and test them again, which is what we’re doing with the “.0″ filetype extension.”

But still, Google will not be able to crawl web content that ends with extensions such as .exe, .tgz or .dll etc. as that all has binary data which can not be entirely crawled and so they are just termed as “Meaningless blobs” according to Matt, this kind of extensions are mostly binary i.e not-very-indexable files, so avoid URLs ending with binary files extensions, for crawl by Google.

After the revisit of old decision and switched to crawl pages that end with .0 the Seomoz.org web 2.0 page now got PR again but it PR6 and not PR7 again.

A new and very promising toplevel domain is about to be launched - .me. This tld obviously allows very interesting offers - it is the first really “personal” tld on the market.

There will be no restrictions in regard of registrant’s residence or other contact policies.
The Landrush begins on June, 6th, 15:00 UTC and ends on June, 26th, 17:00 UTC. And many multinationals industries and individual has filed multiple domain name registrations for the .me domain offered by Montenegro.

The .me registry says it has received thousands of domain name registrations in the first week of availability. Applicants include tech industry leaders such as Apple -which registered apple.me, ipod.me and itunes.me - as well as Microsoft, Skype and Digg. Other multinationals that have registered .me names include MTV and BMW.

Trademark-holders have until 20 May to register their company and product names under the new .me domain, which is being marketed as a generic top-level domain by the country of Montenegro. Afilias, which handles back-end registrations for .me, predicts the domain will have widespread appeal.

“The .me extension gives every company on the planet the opportunity to personalize their brands…and make them more relevant to today’s Internet-savvy teens,” says Roland LaPlante, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Afilias. “Companies should be registering .me names not just from an intellectual property protection standpoint, but because there is so much business opportunity to personalise products.”

Predrag Lesic, CEO of the .me registry in Montenegro, says the new internet extension will appeal not only in English-speaking countries but also across the former Yugoslavia, Italy and Spanish-speaking countries, where the letters “me” have a similar meaning as in English.

“We think .me can offer a new business around domain names with verbs,” Lesic says, such as drive.me or fly.me. “This is the start of a new opportunity on the internet.”

The last time a country tried to market its country code extension as a generic domain name was the tiny island nation Tuvulu, which runs the .tv registry. Although .tv names have been available for a decade and have been marketed by VeriSign for online video content, the .tv extension is not among the 10 most popular country code top-level domains.

“I think .tv is starting to get some traction,” LaPlante says. “But .me’s appeal is more immediate and a lot more obvious to people…It should sell well into the millions. And it has corporate appeal not just for TV stations, which are limited in number.”

Companies will need to pay a sizeable sum for a .me name. The retail price for .me names range from 110 to 200 Euros per year for a minimum of five years. That equals $825 to $1,500 for the five-year registration.

In contrast, .com names cost around $10 per year, and .tv names cost around $18 per year.

Companies can reserve .me names from more than 60 domain name registrars companies. Anyone can register a .me name from 6 June through 26 June. The .me registry is scheduled to go live on July 17.

Sunrise of .Me

The current schedule for the launch of .Me is as follows:

• May, 6th 17:00 UTC - May 20th 17:00: General Sunrise (Trademark Owners)
• June, 6th 15:00 UTC - June 26th, 17:00 UTC:: Landrush
• July, 17th 15:00 UTC: Start of regular registrations

Some facts about Sunrise (from May, 6th on):

• Trademark Owners are invited to apply for domains matching their trademarks
• The application date for these trademarks has to be before 2006-06-28
• The minimum registration period is 5 years
• Domain names will be awarded at the end of Sunrise
• No first-come, first served - the order of applications is not important, there’s no advantage in “being the first”
• Domains with more than one application are automatically enrolled for an auction process, invitations will be sent by email

Some facts about Landrush (from June, 6th on):

• Anyone is eligible to apply for a domain
• The minimum registration period is 2 years
• Domain names will be awarded at the end of Landrush
• No first-come, first served - the order of applications is not important, there’s no advantage in “being the first”
• Domains with more than one application are automatically enrolled for an auction process, invitations will be sent by email

The process of web site optimization implies many operations regarding the changing of different web objects’ properties. The main purpose of optimization action is to reduce the size of large files, such as multimedia files for example. Web page code optimization will lead to a higher rendering speed of the page by web browser. The internal links and external links validation represents also a stage in the overall optimization process.

A complete website optimization process includes various individual steps, which could take a lot of time to be executed. Their efficiency could not have the maximal value, due to the fact that optimization operations are performed manually. Fortunatelly, automatic optimization tools exist, allowing the webmaster to perform website optimization directly from computer desktop or from a web server. Read the rest of this entry »

Tips for Rapid Blog Deployment on Wordpress.com

On the Internet there are many free services that provide web hosting accounts to anyone having a valid email address. But usually these web hosting services impose some limitations that will determine certain server side applications not to work at their full parameters.

Concerning free web hosting services that provide support for deployment of PHP / MySQL applications, the most common limitations imposed are PHP in safe mode and a predefined number of MySQL database file sizes. For example, when you create a blog that runs on a WordPress platform, many errors could appear on a free web hosting account when you want to install certain plugins; even the main WordPress application works with PHP safe mode on. Read the rest of this entry »

As millions of travelers prepare to fly home for the holidays this year, a few thousand can expect to try out a new generation of onboard e-mail and text-messaging services using their own cellphones and portable devices.

Starting this week and over the next few months, several airlines in the United States and Europe are due to begin testing these new services on some of their planes, with plans to roll out the technology across most of their fleets over the next 12 to 18 months. Read the rest of this entry »

Excitement over Sedo-run auction generates record-breaking revenue, led by sale of music.mobi for $616,000 and games.mobi for $401,500

dotMobi, the company behind the .mobi Internet domain for mobile phones, closed its 2007 online auction series on December 5 with a record-breaking auction that generated approximately $2.3 million for the continued creation of mobile content tools like dotMobi’s popular http://ready.mobi and http://site.mobi tools and its forthcoming device database. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last several years, Red Hat has been pushing forward the development of real-time enhancements for Linux. Yet the company has made no formal product announcement of how it would attempt to productize its real-time Linux innovations.

That changed today, with the announcement of the Red Hat MRG (Messaging, Real Time and Grid) platform. The product is expected to be available as a public beta this month, with a generally available release set for early 2008.

The product’s real-time enhancements provide deterministic performance for the kernel that enables actions to occur within the same amount of time, every time — a feature critical for a number of industries including telecommunications, the military, healthcare and financial services.
Read the rest of this entry »