Category Archives: web

Auth Code Help. Authorization Code Instructions for Domain Name Transfers from Godaddy, Moniker, and more.

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Even after thousands of domain name transactions over the years I’m always pulling my hair out with domain name transfer process which, like many mixtures of bureaucratic bungling and private sector greed, is about as frustrating, cumbersome, and potentially catastrophic.   You can even lose domain names – a key hallmark of many businesses – to scammers, inept registrars, or simple bad luck.     This post will be my attempt to help people figure out some of the quirks in the process.

First, recognize that you should not be paying more than about $10 per year for registration unless you are ALSO getting some local help/service/ etc from a webmaster. I use GoDaddy but there are many others that have reasonable fees.

Second, if you have a domain name(s) for your business or other valuable names you should register them for at least 5 years to decrease the chance you’ll lose the name.   Also, some believe search algorithms like to see longer registration times as a sign of authenticity, meaning it might help you rank a bit better all other things equal.

Third, BEWARE of the letters in the mail trying to pretend you need to renew a domain name that are really attempts to get you to switch to that registrar.   These are often legal forms of scams where they are a real service but are not the registrar you have now.

Generally you will find it easy to initiate a TRANSFER  IN to an account, and hard to nearly impossible to TRANSFER OUT.   Registrars generally make it very, very difficult to figure out the transfer out process because this will help keep people with them and even if you get angry they are losing your money and business anyway.

Unfortunately you’ll often need to do BOTH of these procedures to move a domain name from one registrar to another.   If you focus on the “TRANSFER OUT” and the required “AUTH CODES” and you’ll probably have success.

GODADDY Auth Codes:

Godaddy’s process is cumbersome but fairly straightforward.    Full details here from Godaddy.   Short version:

  1. Log in to your GoDaddy Account Manager.
  2. In the My Products section, click Domain Manager.
  3. Click the domain for which you want to retrieve the authorization code.
  4. In the Authorization Code field, click the Send by Email hyperlink.
  5. Click OK.
  6. Click OK again.

Moniker Auth Codes.

Moniker is the current front runner in my “diabolically difficult” online routine contest.   However once you know the secret you’ll be fine.  Be sure to put away ANY guns you have in the house before using their online help system or you’ll be using one on yourself.

The secret:  You obtain the Moniker Auth code to do external transfers as follows:

1. Log into your Moniker Account, select  “my domains”.

2. Now check the domain(s) you want to transfer out and click “transfer out”

3. Complete the “transfer out” dialog.

4. You should very shortly receive two emails.   You want the one that looks like the one below with domain name followed by a comma and a string that is the Auth code for that domain for the next 10 days.

5. If the process fails you may have to repeat this again (and again!) until the transfer “takes”.    Often if you purchase a domain from a third party they have *recently* registered that name and you won’t be able to transfer it for 60 days.  You’ll thus need to mark your calendar and start the process then as well as make sure the domain is registered at least through the transfer date (usually it will be as a year is usually added during the new registration)

THIS IS ONLY half the transfer process, now you’ll need to follow the instructions from your new registrar to transfer the domain *IN*, but those are usually straightforward  if you have the Auth Code.

Example Moniker Tranfer Out email:

[NOTICE] Account: 99999 Requesting Domains For Transfer Away From Moniker

As part of our standard transfer-out procedure, a notification has been submitted to Moniker notifying us of an intent to transfer the following domain(s) away from Moniker

This email serves as confirmation that we have received your notification.

This request will be valid for 10 days (240 hours).

The Reason Given For Transfer Was: changeOwnership

Domain Name,Epp AuthInfo (if applicable)
———– —————————-

2ILLINOIS.COM, 9999999CDC9
2MISSISSIPPI.COM,  9A9999B999EE

 

How to find your Enom Auth Code:
How to obtain the authorization code and unlock a domain name on eNom

Log in.

In the “Registered domains” row, click “Manage Domains”.

Click the domain you want to unlock.

In the “Manage Domain” menu, click “General Settings”.

To retrieve the EPP key, click “Email Auth Code to Registrant”.

A message confirms that the authorization code has been emailed.

To unlock the domain, go to the “Registrar-Lock” row and select “Disable”, and then click “save”.

A message confirms that the update was successful.

Mark Cuban: Companies that Live by Free Stuff will Die by Free Stuff

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The always clever, almost always insightful, and sometimes good dancer Mark Cuban has a great post today about “Freemium” companies.   Cuban suggests:

Its not that they can’t make money offering free. They can , have and will. The problem is that they know that its literally  impossible  to be the king of the mountain forever. But that won’t stop them from trying. And that is exactly what will kill them.

Their better choice would be to run the company as profitably as possible, focusing only on those things that generate revenue and put cash in the bank.  More importantly, when you see your BlackSwan company appear and you know they will kick your ass, rather than ramping up to try to compete, get out. Sell. Or maximize cash and pay your shareholders every penny you have.

Like every company in the free space, your lifecycle has come to its conclusion. Don’t fight it. Admit it.  Profit from it.

I think Cuban is right on, though I think he’d also agree that most companies won’t take his advice, especially Google which stands to gain (but also lose) the most from maintaining their massive search revenue and general online dominance.

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/07/05/the-freemium-company-lifecycle-challenge/

Why Twitter matters … a lot. Clue = Soylent Green.

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Twitter is moving into the mainstream faster than any major internet application in history, and is redefining  online behavior as we continue to  move away from “internet as information” and into the era of “internet as people”.

Obviously both information and socializing will play a huge role in online behavior for the duration, but like the ubiquitous and mysterious food source in the old Charleton Heston Movie, Soylent Green

solyentgreen

Twitter is especially  important because ….  “Twitter is People”.

Some Twitter enthusiasts wrongly suggest that Twitter is important because it is breaking a few bits and bytes of news in real time (e.g. Hudson Plane Crash, CA Plane Crash) or providing a platform for discussion of pressing social issues (e.g. Gaza War).    Meanwhile Twitter critics very foolishly point to the obvious about Twitter’s superficiality as if this was a defect.

Twitter is certainly largely superficial in terms of how people chit chat on the service, but this is the reason for it’s spectacular success.  Humans by nature – ie by millions of years of evolution – are not designed well for thoughtful, reasoned discourse.   Instead, for much of evolutionary history we were very UNintelligently designed by trial and error and random mutations to survive in sometimes hostile environments.     This makes us a short term, superficial socializing thinker more than a long term planner.    Sure, we sometimes  do that long term stuff but if there are any lessons we can derive from history  it is how poorly humanity has optimized our long term well being.    One need look no further than the ongoing global financial crisis, global terror threats, tribal disputes across Africa, or global religious intolerance to see how poorly we cope with situations that would probably respond well with even a modest level of long term, optimal  planning rather than the short term knee jerk nonsense that often stains our  local and international finance, politics, and social relationships.

Twitter’s simplicity and superficiality are exactly why it will continue to thrive, diving into mainstream use faster than you can Tweet  Ellen Degeneres, who yesterday challenged her viewers to become “followers” of her Twitter account.    Although her goal of a million followers was not realistic, Ellen rose from zero to over 110,000 followers in a single day – perhaps a Twitter record and certainly a demonstration of a significant convergence of Television and internet audiences.

As internet activity stabilizes I think we’ll see people relying more and more on Twitter as their socializing platform of choice.    There’s certainly room for many social networking sites,  but I think Facebook needs to worry that Twitter may diminish the time people spend at Facebook in favor of the simpler, more intuitive interactions at Twitter.     Twitter has done for social networking what Google did for Search – they created a super clean interface and made it extremely easy to participate, building a large and happy user base in a very short time.     Unlike Google, however, Twitter will continue to face challenges monetizing their success, for as we’ve learned from Facebook’s experiences with ads and advertising fiascos it is not nearly as easy to make money in social networking as in information searching.    I predict it never will be as easy and Twitter is likely to face some interesting challenges as they try to bridge the gap between user enthusiasm for Twitter and aversion to advertising.      However Twitter will be a spectacular success with even a fraction of Google’s adverising revenue, so I see them thriving for some time.

TechCrunch’s Erick has this

Death of the Media Mogul: Digital Diaspora means …. less for everybody.

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As podcasters and webcasters and such try to turn a buck they come up against fixed ad revenues.

Ad model is a problem

(Note several comments came in based on those two sentences before I finished this post)

The main point I’m trying to make here is that the internet has created a remarkably cheap and effective content distribution mechanism – a global soapbox for anybody who cares to make a point online.    The cost to publish online is now essentially zero for all but very  large scale online publishing efforts.    Although eventually the number of publishers will level off as everybody who wants to be online gets online and the dropping out folks balance the new arrivals, I think we are still early enough in that process that there’s a lot of new website and blogging action ahead of us.

This suggests that it may be increasingly hard to become a  *Media Mogul* even in fairly specific niches.      We’ve seen the rise of mini moguls like Arriana Huffington in the Political space,  Mike Arrington in Technology at TechCrunch, Jason Calacanis , and Nick Denton of the Gawker Yellow Journalism and Celebrity Blog Empire,  but I think the success of early blogs is more a transitional thing than a trend that’s going to stick.     Few blogs make much if any money and that’s not likely to change a lot although I suspect we’ll see lots of hard working good writers find comfortable niches of expertise managing to make a living providing online content – at least until the machines start to slice and dice and repackage online information so effectively nobody can tell if it’s organic or artificially intelligent organization.

Now, contrast this trend towards many publishers with the fact that online advertising total spending may actually decline in 2009, and more importantly can only grow so much.    Now, it’s true that the online spend is currently low enough that we may see online advertising grow enough to support the growth of online content for some time, but my guess is that content is growing many, many times faster than online advertising it needs to be profitably supported.   Luckily for users the content is not going to go away and will keep flowing online, but unluckily for online publishers they are going to have to produce more and more to make the same amount.   We’re already seeing this trend with sites like TechCrunch which often spin out dozens of articles daily.

As an online publisher myself I’m not really sure how to address this challenge.    Certainly I tend to favor keeping expenses under control and not making the mistakes we did earlier in the travel empire by spending too much to improve websites that were always under the gun of Google’s somewhat algorithmically arbitrary content policies.   Better I think to use small amounts of capital to seed a lot of project and then fund the winners and let the losers whither on the vine.     I’ve written a lot about this process which I think is somewhat analogous to biological evolution where smart businesses actually are usually working away from failure more than towards success.    I know a many successful business folks (and perhaps even *more* biz wannabes) would bristle at the notion that serendipity plays as much a role in success as careful, reasoned strategy but the more I see of success and of failure the less convinced I am that formulas play much of a role.    Sure it helps to work hard, have a general idea of what you want to do, etc, but like evolution I don’t think a whole lot of planning is the recipe for most success stories.  On the contrary you find engaging people engaged in things they enjoy and are very good at doing, and you find lucky breaks or circumstances that propelled thos particular people to fame.    Music and sports are a great example of this – for every thousand excellent singers or sportspeople there are only a handful of superstars, and the road to that stardom is often littered with personal tragedy as well as the failures of the other 999 folks who didn’t make it.    I think the reason we tend to think there are success “formulas” is that we examine success too much and failure … too little.

OK, I got too far afield  – must be the turkey talking.   Hmmmm …. where is that leftover stuffing anyway?

Luke … I’m your Facebook Father

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Parents are starting to flow online and although I’m still searching for some data on this topic I think the main reason is not at all to follow their own college-aged children, almost all of whom have been socially interacting online for many years.    Rather it is to connect with their own friends and relatives as the online social universe expands to include …. virtually … everybody.

Facebook’s dignified style probably has helped with this trend as Myspace  is is less appealing to the professional and parental style world view.    However I think mostly we’re just seeing something of a Gladwellian  “tipping point” where enough friends and relatives of online friends and relatives  have come online to reach a critical mass.

Obviously we still have many years to go before “everybody” who wants to be connected online is connected, but I think we are  crossing some thresholds that will be sociologically significant.      One of these thresholds is the parent / child continuum, where parents like me with college age kids like Ben become “friends” on Facebook and wind up sharing types of information that are generally *not shared* between parents and their kids or the friends of their kids.

On balance I’m very optimistic about this development.  I think it’s a way to *add transparency* to the system, especially for kids who are facing personal challenges and sharing information online that their parents should know and act on.     More common however will be an *enhancement* of functional relationships between parents and kids.     In fact what inspired this post was noting a very thoughtful and loving “wall” note at Facebook had come from the *mom* of a friend of my son’s.    My first reaction (my “legacy media” reaction) was that it seemed like too public a place to rave about your kid, but I quickly realized that the mom was just adopting the very nice new tendency of the bright and shiny kids in the new generation to give glowing praise to each other very publicly.    Note to Loic Le Meur and Mike Arrington – you guys could learn from those young whippernappers!

A threshold I find even more interesting is something I have yet to experience but I’m sure better connected folks like Robert Scoble have by now, which is where social networking finds new and significant, but previously unknown connections between friends and relatives.     e.g.  you find out you are your close friend’s second cousin once removed.    Or, I suppose in some of those “fun but alarming”  stories, people will  find that they really were adopted and their biological parents are actually their … current in-laws.        Hello, this is Jerry Springer calling.

Still, the implications of a massively interconnected social sphere are to my way of thinking very positive.      We’re not there yet but we’ll be there soon, and at the very least it’s going to get even more … interesting.

SES San Jose 2008 sets attendance record

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SES San Jose is reporting record attendance at this year’s conference.    I’m hoping to track down the numbers which are not listed in the press release, and here at day 1 there don’t seem to be as many folks as last year.  However I think the format changes may have changed the traffic flow such that we’ll see the big numbers tomorrow and Wednesday.

SES offers free admission to exhibits for those who pre-register.  This does not give people access to session content but it’s still an OK introduction to the big show, and perhaps most importantly gets you a ticket to the Google Dance, which many see as the highlight of the year in search and internet marketing.

Knol Knows Ranking

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Google’s new knol project features articles on any topic by anybody who cares to call themselves an expert.   The concept is really intriguing as it relates to bringing higher authority information online that will be vetted both by the author and by the community at large.

Search marketing guru Aaron Wall is one of the sharpest fellows in the SEO business and he’s been testing knol and has concerns about the results both in terms of outranking original material and copyright.

Aaron on knol

The SMX search folks – I think it was Danny Sullivan – have also been testing knol and also are suggesting knol material is ranking very well.     Google says they are not giving their own site preferential treatment, but I’m guessing what they mean is that they are applying the same rules to knol as other sites.    If, for example, those rules that are *applied equally to all sites* happen to include a high value for incoming links from Google sites or other knol pages, the knol content effectively has a big advantage, technically without any special treatment.

In terms of search strategy I think the rule here is to …. write some knol page for topics of interest to you or topics for which you want to improve your rank.      I expect knol to be a huge topic at the upcoming search conference  – SES San Jose.

Later:  Time to check out this knol thing by creating some content myself.    Here are listings I created for:

Beijing, China |     Blogs and Blogging

Google: A Trillion URLs and counting

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The Google blog notes how huge the web is now, with Google indexing over a trillion unique URLs.  As they note in the article the actual number of indexable URLs is, in one sense, infinite.    For example calendar pages will automatically appear as you scroll through many applications, continuing through the years until..the singularity and beyond.     Of course Google does not index many of these “empty” URLs or even a lot of junk or redundant content, so the true number of real, unique URLs is actually well above a Trillion.

I think a fun question is this:   What will the information landscape look like in, say, 20 years when we should have the ability to pour *everything* from the past and the present online?     Questions might take a different form if we had access to every reference on a topic that has ever been produced.    Algorithms will be used to sort through the oceans of content much as Google does now, but with far more precision and better comprehension of the whole mess.