Nearly all Chinese festival domain names registered

[companyone]

Hi,

Nearly all Chinese festival domain names registered

Nearly all Internet domains named after Chinese festivals have been registered, the People's Daily reported.

Over 40 traditional Chinese festivals have been registered as domain names, including the Lantern Festival and the Double Ninety Festival, sources with the China Internet Network Information Center were quoted by the paper as saying.

Especially since the Dragon Boat Festival (Duanwu Festival), a traditional Chinese festival, was used by a company from the Republic of Korea as a domain name (Duanwu.cn), the protection of China's traditional culture on the Internet has become a hot topic, the paper said.

The names of minority nationality festivals have also been used, such as the Water-Sprinkling Festival of the Dai ethnic group and Lesser Bairam of Hui ethnic group, the paper said.

Foreign festivals with Chinese characteristics, including Christmas and Saint Valentine's Day, have also been registered as domain names, the paper said.

International festivals like Children's Day and Labor Day, in Chinese characters, also appear on the Internet as domain names, the paper added.

"The enthusiasm about registration of Chinese domain names is because, on the one hand, the Chinese are beginning to realize the importance of the protection of traditional Chinese culture on the Internet, and on the other hand, recognize the value of domain names in Chinese as a kind of potential resource," experts were quoted by the paper as saying

http://english.people.com.cn/200512/...12_227364.html



Dan

[none]

Not only that, but all the important festivals have been registered in IDN form long ago.

[Rubber Duck]

Well, it is a a bit like registering Christmas!

We have quite a few terms but only as dot nets, obvious targets went early.

We did, however, manage to get Diwali as dot com in Hindi. This is the biggest commercial event of the year on the Sub-continent!

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[touchring]

98% of .com popular terms in Chinese/Japanese IDNs are registered, let alone festivals.

By the time a reseller market for Asian IDN is formed over the next few years, the only way to get a generic Chinese/Japanese IDN is to buy it for $xxx or $xxxx - there will be none left to register. And those that had the foresight or opportunity to cherry pick in 2000/2001 will be millionaires when that happens.

And we will see hundreds of posts on DNF grumbling why they didn't make the move and spend a couple thousands (the price of a 2-word generic dot com) to secure their next million.

I guess it's the same situation when people in 1995 thought that $70 a year registration fee is too much for a single word .com.

History always repeats itself.

[Rubber Duck]

98% of .com popular terms in Chinese/Japanese IDNs are registered, let alone festivals.

By the time a reseller market for Asian IDN is formed over the next few years, the only way to get a generic Chinese/Japanese IDN is to buy it for $xxx or $xxxx - there will be none left to register. And those that had the foresight or opportunity to cherry pick in 2000/2001 will be millionaires when that happens.

And we will see hundreds of posts on DNF grumbling why they didn't make the move and spend a couple thousands (the price of a 2-word generic dot com) to secure their next million.

I guess it's the same situation when people in 1995 thought that $70 a year registration fee is too much for a single word .com.

History always repeats itself.

But who on earth wants to pay for a lot of unintelligible squiggle? s:-D

[touchring]

Yes, that's correct, that's why people pay $xxxx for abc.in, abc.cn, abc.tw, abc.jp.

Domainers generally go for the English equivalent so as to avoid the squiggle. This works to varying degree in different countries.

For example, if you search 'computer' in English in Taiwan OVT, you get 1415. JP OVT, 1132, and KR OVT, 3061.

In their native terms, computer in Taiwan is 電腦 and returns OVT 36,530, Japanese equivalent コンピュータ returns 329,054, and Korean equivalent 컴퓨터 returns 445,184.

Notice the extremely low percentage of 0.3% for computer in JP as compared to the native equivalent.




Note: I'm using Google translator for Japanese and Korean, so i dunno if they are the most popular term for computer.

[Honan]

Then why are you spruiking it?
If it such a good thing, why don't you just keep quiet and reap the profits in a couple of years?
Why draw attention to the fact that 2% of .com popular terms in Chinese/Japanese IDNs are available to be registered.
Why not just register them and keep quiet until you have people offering you large sums?
Why would you want other people to spend a couple thousands now (the price of a 2-word generic dot com) to secure their next million?
Why do you care if there will be hundreds of posts on DNF grumbling why they didn't make the move?

BTW Dave : re your sig "Using ASCII in Asia is like driving a Train on a Road" :
Roadtrains are very efficient and economical way of moving freight over long distances here in oz
If you see a road train coming, you get out of the way quickly because it is not going to move over for you
Perhaps there is an analogy there with English langauage and Asia

[Rubber Duck]

Well, if your heavily invested already, secrecy is not such a big deal.

The secondary market is starting to take-off and we need more outlets for traffic. Furthermore, the better understood these name are the more they are worth. I am a speculator, but these names require developers and SEO people to get involved in Website development in Asia, for their value to be maximised.

I never used the Term Roadtrain, but it is still a question of horse for courses. Roadtrains have no real place on the roads of Europe, despite one or two proponents. They work in wide open spaces where manouvering requirements are very limited. They are good for transporting between hubs, but absolutely no use for flexible distribution of services. ASCII is similar, it goes through the DNS very efficiently, but it is useless for marketing goods and services to people who are not comfortable using Latin Characters.

Computers are making it totally unnecessary for other cultures to conform to our norms. We are rapidly loosing the power to coerce them into confirming, so the assumption is that they will communicate in they they feel most confortable with.

You cannot expect the Chinese to put aside 5,000 years of cultural heritage, just because the US and others are too idle to try and market goods and services in a culturally and linguistically relevant context. US goods basically won't sell in the way that they have. A lot of work needs to be done on the product, but also a lot of innovation needs to go into the marketing.

The Chinese are just not going to buy into the unbridged version of the American Dream.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[touchring]

Then why are you spruiking it?
If it such a good thing, why don't you just keep quiet and reap the profits in a couple of years?
Why draw attention to the fact that 2% of .com popular terms in Chinese/Japanese IDNs are available to be registered.
Why not just register them and keep quiet until you have people offering you large sums?
Why would you want other people to spend a couple thousands now (the price of a 2-word generic dot com) to secure their next million?
Why do you care if there will be hundreds of posts on DNF grumbling why they didn't make the move?

2% of .com popular terms in Chinese/Japanese IDNs are available to be registered -> finding this 2% is no easy task - you can ask Dave.

That's one of the reasons why people are not registering them - there's a time tradeoff.

Hundreds/thousands of dollars can be made trading abc.com with the time spent in hunting down these idns that fetch virtually no resale value at the moment.

:-D

[Rubber Duck]

That is not actually correct. The sales I have made to date average more than more than 4 figures each.

Selling is not the main obective. Getting the infrastucture in place to exploit the potential traffic is the main motivation.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[touchring]

I'm referring to the 2% that are still available. The domains you reg in 2004 to mid 2005 they are of better quality than those currently available.

I've recently offered $1xxx for a country domain, that guy didn't want to sell, and asked for $8xxx. These are registered much earlier, way back in 2000/2003 period.

On the issue of developing infrastructure, you might want to forward your domains to actual sites to encourage people to use them. I'm thinking of doing that for some of my domains.