The main issue I had with Twitter was the idea that it was based on following another person and knowing their whereabouts. However, I couldn’t have been more incorrect. Twitter is a powerful networking tool if used properly. You can start conversations with the biggest and best people in your industry. You can find potential clients who talk about needing a service or product you offer. More importantly, you can maintain these relationships. Once you take that first step and provoke that conversation, follow up with them later on. Let them know you’re interested in them and they should be interested in you.

Since I began utilizing Twitter, I fell in love with it and encourage you to sign up if you’re not on it. And while you’re at it, feel free to follow me: twitter.com/samsilverman.

When the FBI issued arrest warrants for those involved in FullTiltPoker.com, PokerStars, and The Cereus Network, the FBI also seized all assets of each company. This included SamSilverman.com, as it was an asset of the FBI.

Go to SamSilverman.com. It redirects to FullTiltPoker.com, which discusses the FBI’s issuance of arrest warrants and seizure of company property, or assets. Talk about bad publicity for me! So what is my course of action now that the FBI is the new proud owners of SamSilverman.com (MYNAME).com? I’ll wait to let the FBI make their first move. I should probably stay out of this one.

Who else can say their (MYNAME).com is owned by the FBI? Pretty cool, eh?

“We rate VeriSign Buy (1M). VeriSign is levered to improving trends in eCommerce and online advertising in its core domain name business where we expect growth to re-accelerate over the course of 2011. A measured pace of investment in the business as well as the inherent operating leverage in the core businesses should enable operating margin expansion to continue and 15%+ earnings growth through 2012. 2012 is the first year of clean financials following a relatively messy divestiture process.”

Consumers, on the other hand, must disagree with Citibank as the stock price fell 0.93% this past Monday. But it’s important that we let the rest of the week play out in order to see whether consumers will end up putting their faith in Citibank, Verisign, and the domaining industry (or as Citibank calls it, the domain name business).

GoDaddy receives a lot of critique within the domaining industry. However, GoDaddy remains the largest domain registrar on the world wide web. Mitt Romney is not the only celebrity who registers his domain with GoDaddy. Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian, Avril Lavigne and several other big names in varying industries also use GoDaddy.

Hope that’s a fun fact to get you through the day. Please refrain from any political-oriented comments. We all know where that leads!

Known best for its eNom.com domain registry, eHow.com website with how-to articles, and YouTube how-to videos, Demand Media has an interesting business model. Instead of focusing on targeting consumers performing generic online searches, the company focuses on specifics. Or as it says in the IPO registration, “Our approach is driven by consumers’ desire to search for and discover increasingly specific information across the Internet.”

While having an interesting model, the company lost $22 million last year, and $6 million in the first 6 months of this year. For a low-cost business, these losses are hard to believe. The company has about 10,000 freelancers working writing and creating videos for them. They only pay writers about $15/article and the makers of videos about $30. Producing approximately 5,700 new items each day, the company sets a standard for freelancer productivity.

eHow.com and other how-to websites owned by Demand Media are reported to have approximately 86 million unique visitors each month, producing 550 million pageviews each month. Looking at those numbers, I can’t believe how a company like this is unprofitable. After reading an article on Tech Crunch, I learned a lot about where Demand Media was making money and where it wasn’t. Here are some quick facts about Demand Media’s profits:

- 44% of the company’s revenues are from its domain business, eNom.com.

- 45% of  the company’s revenues are from advertisers.

- 26% of the company’s revenues are from Google’s ad program, Google AdSense.

- 21% of the company’s revenues are from the eHow.com website.

After seeing this, I determined that the company is spending way to much money on its content creation for eHow.com. Let me break this down for you. Out of the 5,700 new articles and videos everyday, let’s say that 5,200 are articles and 500 are videos. That means Demand Media is spending about $78,000 on articles and $15,000 on videos each day. That accounts for approximately $33,480,000 in the company’s yearly expenses. Seeing that $33,480,000 in spending is only making up for 21% of the company’s revenue, I think the company should use some of its resources elsewhere.

With all of that being said, it’s still yet to come out where and how Demand Media has lost and is still losing money into this year. Would you invest in Demand Media if it goes public? What do you think of their business model? Submit your comments below.

On my way back from the city today, (surprise, surprise) I received my 9th call from Doba this month. When I asked to be taken off their calling list, the representative laughed and refused my request. He then proceeded to insult me multiple times. I immediately asked to speak with his superviser. I wasn’t going to sit on the phone and listen to this jerk, nor was I going to continue getting calls from Doba. I explained my story to his supervisor, who told me that I was out-of-line and his employee did nothing wrong. The employee fought me about being put on the do not call list (which may or may not exist for Doba), and ended the phone call by hanging up on me mid-sentance.

This experience makes me question 2 things about Doba. First, it makes me question their employment procedures and practices. How exactly do they find these employees? I can promise you that because both the employee and his supervisor I spoke to disrespected me to the extent they did, Doba clearly isn’t too worried about their employees maintaining respect to clients and potential clients. Seeing as that is the first thing most companies look for in positions where employees deal with people, I think calling to question Doba’s employment procedures is reasonable.

Secondly, it makes me question Doba’s business practices. You’d think after asking a total of 5 representatives to be put on a do not call list, you’d be on that list. And yet everytime I ask, the calls continue coming in (and in today’s case, my privacy gets disrespected). Thus making it more than appropriate for me to question their business practices.

Anyways, what’s the moral of the story? Don’t sign up for Doba’s trials or for more information unless you’re ready to be harassed by numerous phone calls until you sign up.

Take Fusible.com’s article on the sale of HomeRun.com as exhibit A. As the article says, one would think HomeRun.com would be used for some sort of baseball-related website, whether a fantasy baseball site or a baseball news website. Instead, it’s used as a website that gives you great deals for activities in your city.

Now, let’s go back to how we defined brandable domains. One of the main pieces of criteria is that the domain generally has little or no meaning. Does a home run have a significant relationship (in terms of meaning) with great deals in a city? One might think there’s SOME relationship between the two, but definitely not much. Does this make HomeRun.com a brandable domain name? In this case, they took a domain name that has specific meanings and turned it into a name with little or no meaning. This is why I think it’s both a brandable domain name and general domain name.

Is it a good thing that this idea of brandability is beginning to clash with generality? Will this have an effect on the value of brandable or general domain names? Do you even think the two are clashing? Submit your comment below and let’s hear some thoughts.

For example, I have a close friend who created a FormSpring.me profile a couple of days ago. At first, she was receiving questions from friends who were joking around and sending her inside jokes anonymously. She got a kick out of that. But don’t be fooled, it went all downhill from there. She began receiving messages related to sex, and even received a threat related to her “social status”. While I can’t go into details for her own privacy sake, I think I made my point clear. Harassment and bullying happens on FormSpring.me. It’s not made up.

For those of you who have been members of Facebook for some time, you may have remembered the honesty box. Almost every teen and young adult had one. It’s an application that allows you to submit anonymous messages to another Facebook friend. The amount of threatening and harassing messages sent and received through the application was unbelievable. That’s the whole reason the honest box application has died down.

Are we really going to let a website like FormSpring.me take the place of the honesty box and continue to allow kids a place to anonymously harass and embarrass others? What’s going on can’t be continued. Websites like FormSpring.me shouldn’t exist.

Head over to GoDaddy.com, and use the coupon code BUY2010. These coupons normally only last for a day or two, so make sure to grab your domain before the promotion ends.

An interesting twist to promotion that we haven’t seen with GoDaddy’s $0.99 promotions in the past is they are allowing you to use the coupon code with any domain extension that they offer.