namewaiter said:
well of course there is more, take for example all the variations of 'business'...
please consider i don't have special character keys on my pc...
b^siness.com
b&siness.com
b*siness.com
b#siness.com
b%siness.com
b!siness.com
bu^iness.com
bu&iness.com
bu*iness.com
bu#iness.com
bu%iness.com
bu!iness.com
and so on and so on...
and then multiple this by all the different languages and the one word becomes thousands ... and people who registers one think they have a very unique domain, but the fact is all these variations only muddy the internet tenfold. if you hold a single character idn domain ... i do think that these have some value, but it so limited because of access issues. to be honest, i really don't have a true understanding of idns, i just see what people are trying to sell, get appraised, but i have no intentions of registering one or buying one for the reasons i stated.
good luck if you hold a few, domaining is truely a speculative industry.
and btw.. thanks for the link, there is some good info there.
Yes, I share your perspective on these type of domains you have listed and they should probably legislated against.
I personally only invest in genuine Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Hindi and Arabic Domains and yes I do hold hundreds of single character domains including most of the Arabic Alphabet as dot coms. Japanese Hirigana characters are also going to be huge. Some of ours throw up over a Billion pages on a Google search. Actually, I do have a single novelty domain, which is dot com in a Playing Card Diamond. Have had approaches on that one but the $1000 asking was too high.
The point is you need a character match with search keywords. Chinese and Japanese people search in their own language and you need to be able to match the characters typed-in.
Yes, it is difficult to access if you don't have a local keyboard. The speculator has to improvise, but chinese and japanese users will just use their normal equipment. That is the whole point. I personally have to cut and paste to get these characters, as I only have the same keyboard as you do!
I don't think abuse of IDNs will be so great once they pass into areas for which they have been designed. Clearly homographic imitation has no legitimate value. The problem is as soon as you have a good innovation there are always of queue of conmen trying to exploit it!
The only recent clear cut stats I have on IDN is for the dot de registry, which is now about 260K. These will be largely genuine registrations. Whilst non-accented characters can be used by humans, it is unlikely that accented search words will be able to mapped to non-accented domains. The German IDNs are therefore more important than is immediately obvious. The real market, however, will always be Asia.
Obviously, mispellings do attract traffic, but the domains listed above are unlikely to get much, aren't worth anything and will soon be left to expire!
If you want to get more information on IDN, there is a basic guide available at
www.chinesedomains.info.
Regards
Dave Wrixon