Exile From the Herd

I once was lost, but now I'm found

For some reason, PrivateWorld.com, the domain name I recently moved my personal blog to, a domain I've owned since 1997 and used to house the company website from a previous partnership (Private World Communications) was delisted from the Google index. I'm not sure when it happened as I was receiving traffic from google via this domain almost immediately over the cutover.

To avoid a possible penalty for duplicate content I began using a 301 redirect from my previous Mark.Jeftovic.net blog hostname. No good deed goes unpunished, they say. Once PrivateWorld got dropped from the index I was gone completely since the 301 redirect had basically transferred all my pagerank and indexed pages to the now dropped name.

I think way to handle a situation like this is to ask around on the Google webmaster groups and ask about your particular domain, because Google staffers tend to read these and can sometimes address your site's particular circumstances.

Then watch this video and follow the steps therein. If you haven't already used the Google webmaster tools , there really is a wealth of information and diagnostics there about the Search Engine visibility of your website. I added my sitemap there so I could see what Google saw, I've requested reconsideration - which is supposed to take weeks, but after a few days I seem to be tricking back into the google index.

One of things I did notice under the webmaster tools is the keywords associated with my site content looked pretty "spammy" and I think those were old and dated back to a brief time when I just had the domain parked with a commercial domain parking service. If this is what got my domain dropped from the index, it is mildly startling to say the least. I'm used to seeing parked domains not appear in the google index, but I have also routinely "unparked" domains by developing them and found them appearing in the index within reasonable intervals (less than a few weeks) without seeming to be penalized for their past "parked" status.

So it's a mystery, but an unsettling one when it's unknown why it happened. When my personal blog gets dropped from the index, it's not the end of the world. But had it happened to a domain more central to my business interests, like say, easydns.com, it would be a non-trivial event that would really impact my business - and that scares me. So even though I seem to be re-appearing in the index, I'm hoping my reconsideration request produces an explanation on what caused this.

Tucows may be overlooked as a value stock (no, really)

Some time ago Tucows (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) issued a press release reminding the world that they hold a sizable portfolio of premium domain names, the subtext to which was ostensibly "look at us, we're undervalued". Jay Westerdal over at DomainTools commented in his blog in essence that the premium domain portfolio of Tucows was not priced into the stock and in his estimation he could see the stock doubling within 2 years. Jay's assessment was an estimate. After looking at this in detail, I personally think Tucows has an intrinsic value between 0.94 and 1.58 per share (currently trading at .60) - Note that everything that follows is based on the CDN listing price.
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What is wrong with this picture?

Ad from Craigslist:

Pro Day Trader (Millions_) (Toronto)

Pro Day Trader Looking for venture capital
High return possible (potential Millions)Glad to negotiate
Several years experience in equities,futures
Only serious inquires !200k to do it right
Thank You Don

I've seen ads like this many times. It begs a few obvious questions:

Why seek outside capital to daytrade? The risk premium to the investor would make the cost-of-capital quite prohibitive
If these daytraders are so good, where is their own pile of cash that they've taken out of the market? And why aren't they using that to stake themselves?
What kinds of gains are these guys promising? I've talked to daytraders advertising on craigslist, some of whom claimed consistant, repeatable returns of 20% per month but couldn't explain to me why they weren't several orders of magnitude wealthier than Warren Buffet or George Soros who have managed 15-20% annual returns for decades (and who eschew daytrading like the plague, btw)

I have been following a couple of high-end daytraders (Wall St. Window and The Informed Trader) over the course of this last bear market after the credit markets locked up. They are both saying the same thing: this has been one of the toughest markets to trade that they have ever seen. They've both spent most of their time sitting on the sidelines, in cash watching the market for some feel of where it's going.

As professional daytraders know, "cash is a position" - often the best trade is no trade.

My suspicion when I see ads like this is that I'm reading the ad from a guy who's addicted to daytrading, gone bust and looking for somebody else
to stake him so he can wipe out again.

I've come to the conclusion that the only way to become a successful daytrader is to do it fulltime. You can't run a business and daytrade on the side. So personally I don't daytrade (anymore). But I do highly recommend The Investors Quotient: The Psychology of Successful Investing in Commodities and Stocks - which teaches us that the most important aspects of trading are having a coherent system one sticks to, mental discipline and other psychological factors. In other words, becoming a successful trader is not about conquering the markets, it's about mastering oneself.

In a couple weeks I'm off to the The Search for Value seminar at Western for a week where I hope to hone my acumen at fundamental analysis and value investing.

Ontario Energy Savings or Ontario Energy Slamming?

I have known for some time that the practice of "slamming" was not exclusive to the domain name industry. In my business we are well acquainted with outfits like Domain Registry of Canada and others. There are other related "business models" in the online space: trademark monitoring "services" that look like they come from an official source, nebulous business "directories" you're supposed to "renew your listing" in. These often look like invoices, run several hundred dollars and probably bank on the fact that a certain number of accounts payable departments will just treat them as such and remit payment on them.

We almost got stung in an offline counterpart to the domain slam: A company calling themselves Ontario Energy Savings came to our door and nearly slammed us over to their company for a 5-year contract on gas.
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Newsflash: Some Web 2.0 Companies are Over Valued

I like Techcrunch a lot, and have always been proud that they're an easyDNS DNS hosting client, but sometimes I find myself shaking my head a lot as I scroll through their feed in my bloglines reader. The still pre-revenue Twitter just got something like a Q-round funding giving them a post-money valuation somewhere north of Canada's GDP and some of the A-rounds being announced stand less of a chance succeeding than bluetooth enabled salad forks.

While the current VC's of these deals may succeed in their own business plans (that of achieving subsequent fundings at ever higher valuations, or effecting a liquidation event where some large elephant with too much money takes the entire thing over), whoever ends up ultimately owning these start-ups at the highest valuation will never recoup that "investment" out of earnings from the venture.

With some of these Web 2.0 companies it's like trying to build a business plan and monetize a really hot knock-knock joke. It catches on like wildfire, soon everybody's telling it in the elevator or at the water-cooler. Your cab driver knows it and so did your waiter at lunch. And then some VC firm comes along throws 60 million into the pot thinking eventually people will pay to hear it, or that they can sell advertisements just before the punch line.

I don't see it happening.

What would Eckhart Tolle do with incontrovertible proof that 9/11 was an "inside job"?

Today's post considers far-fringe deep-politics within the context of individual spirituality and consciousness cultivation. It doesn't aim to come off sounding apathetic (9/11 was an inside job? So what?), but it takes a serious look at the "what if it were true" consequences from a viewpoint of "what could we do about it that isn't as bad as the mindset that precipitated it in the first place"?

I come to the conclusion that retribution-oriented finales, be it a blood-in-the-streets revolution or a neo-Nuremburg spectacle where the guilty are hung from meathooks en masse, though understandable, entirely predictable and possibly even probable, are not the enlightened choices. Rather what is needed is a mass exodus from the Herd. It is the Herd that makes these crimes against humanity possible, and it is the Herd which must be fled from and dissolved. Without it, corrupt power mongers are absent a pack of lemmings to drive off a cliff.

I'll then end the post with 7-steps anybody can take to quit the program and say goodbye to the Herd. Bon Voyage!
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The CRTC Gets a Clue...

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to receive the news that Tim Denton has been appointed a full time commissioner to the CRTC (that's our version of the FCC for you American's in the audience).

Having served with Tim on the CIRA Board back in the day, I know that Tim knows his telecom policy, understands technology and he's a lawyer. We need more people like that and I think he'll be in a position to bring his unique blend of expertise to the organization.

Damn Right Your Dad Drank It

As an ex-drinker I'm not generally a militant straight-laced stick-in-the-mud (like the way I am a militant ex-smoker). I couldn't care less if people drink or what they think drinking does for them.

But I find the new Canadian Club Whiskey ad campaign a little silly or bothersome on a couple of levels for some reason, maybe you as well. If so, you may enjoy this ad parody.

Q: How do you get out of a mess? A: don't cause one.

I had to laugh out loud when I watched Jim Rogers interviewed on CNBC, after he lambasted Bernanke for his abject mishandling of the credit market implosion, one interviewer asked: "Tell me two things you would you do if you were Bernanke tomorrow?" - Without missing a beat he said 1: Abolish the fed and 2: Resign
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easyURL adds "FEDEX" tracking widget

Trivial but handy: I found myself having to email out some Fedex tracking ID's today, so I thought what would make it easy would be a way to create a redirect to the Fedex tracking page for that ID without having to visit a URL shortener site to create the redirect.

That's the core idea behind the "URL Widgets" or "Redirect Widgets" of easyURL, which are described here We also have them setup for Amazon products, domain lookups (surprise), Wikipedia pages and RFC's.

How to use your own domain name with Google Apps

Many Ayromlou does it again, publishing another step-by-step tutorial, complete with screen shots on how to use your own domain name on easyDNS with Google Apps..

The Grand Swindle

LTCM, Bre-x, Enron, Subprime, oh my, will we wake up before the Visa IPO scam plays out?

Last week while I watched Orwell Rolls in His Grave and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room I began to experience the feeling that I was hearing the same story again, only describing a different setting and different characters. There was a great line by an obscure singer named Tony Carey which sums it up: "Nothing changes but the names, one more ace shot down in flames, in Tinseltown".

It seems to be happening on both macro and micro scales at all levels of our society: whether it's billion dollar hedge-funds imploding because they can't mark their bullshit derivatives to market, or some Hollywood glam-addicted celeb whose exterior life is coveted by the masses publicly unravels or dies with a whimper and a thud; the consistant theme of today's Zeitgeist is The Flameout. It's been happening for years, their intensity is quickening while their ramifications expand and compound and yet, we rarely learn a damn thing from any of them.

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Are domain names recession-proof? Probably not, next question?

I didn’t see the Fortune article Are domain names recession proof until the weekend, and being the author of the now infamous Domain aftermarket overdue for an asset repricing last year I feel somewhat obligated to comment on it.

There can be no doubt now that the recession is here. I went on record nearly a year ago that it was coming, so I nearly gagged when I saw Jim Cramer say something along the lines of “I told you all this was coming” over the Christmas holidays. So now it’s ok to say “recession” in polite company although the politicians and the pundits still try to soften it up by making sure they modify it with words like “maybe”, “slight”, “mild” and “possible”. Make no mistake, it’s underway and I think we’re far closer to the beginning of it than the end.

So, how will domain names fare in a recession? The Fortune article was upbeat:

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The Economy: Time to Panic? (Not yet, but wear diapers)

As a child, my mother remembers peaking through a window into the bedroom of her grandfather, my great-grandfather, who would sit at a table frantically counting and recounting a few gold coins in a bag. He had gone off his nut, basically, and this was his obsession: emptying a few coins out of his bag and recounting them into it. I was told this tale at a fairly young age and had taken it as a cautionary tale against being miserly or otherwise obsessed with money.

It was only during a recent visit from my mom that I learned the other piece of my great-grandfather's story. He was rich, already a wealthy man before all that "Great War" unpleasantness. WWI ended and he had all of his wealth in (wait for it...) gold. What happened next is what broke the man. A business partner of his convinced him that gold was old news and about as valuable as it was ever going to get (A "barbarous relic" in today's parlance). My great-grandfather agreed he may be right and liquidated the vast majority of his gold bullion and coins into cash. This was in around 1920's Germany, better known then as "The Weimar Republic". Ask any halfway competent student of history about the Weimar Republic and they will all say the one thing it was remembered for the most: HYPERINFLATION.

What is the best possible thing to have oodles of during a period of hyperinflation? Gold What's the worst thing you can do with gold just prior to an episode of hyperinflation? Sell it for cash.

That's what my great-grandfather did and he spent the rest of his days a crazed pauper with OCD. For some reason that story really, I mean really resonates with me on a lot of levels. If I believed in re-incarnation, I would say "I'm that guy, and this time I'm going to get it right goddammit. "

When I flipped past Larry King's show last night and the headline was "The Economy: Time to Panic?" I realized just how badly spoiled we are here in the west.
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He says that like it's a bad thing...

I don't know who Jesse Larner is, I don't own a gun, and I may be the only card carrying libertarian in the world who has never read an Ayn Rand book. But I felt I had to put down my thoughts in response to his "Sinister Folly of Ayn Rand" rant on the Huffington Post. Specifically this comment:

In her insistence that she owed nothing to the state, nothing to any human being other than herself, Rand epitomized the kind of childishness shown by libertarians who insist that they have every legal and moral right to own as many guns as they please, pay no taxes, educate their children at home, and live free of any law except those governing, in the most direct manner, their own security and that of their neighbors. A watered-down form of this nonsense today exists in the platform of presidential candidate Ron Paul...

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