DomainTools Blog

The Traffic Conference hits New York this week. I will be interviewing domainers from around the country and checking out what is new this week. There are several announcements that are happening this week and I will let everyone know what those are as they happen. But back to the conference, My first thoughts when I walked around the welcoming reception at the Conference tonight was that it is good to see everyone again.  This is such a small industry that it seems everyone knows each other, but I never fail to meet someone new when I attend a domain conference. I don’t often have time to mingle at my own conferences so I enjoy attending the Traffic Conferences.

Everyone is competing for attention this week and it is very amusing to watch. The Keynote speech was moved up to the first night because a competing domain party wanted to entertain all the domainers that went to NY this week. We saw a similar situation with Google last week when they announced they would hold a party in Boston to attract over the visitors of the eBay developer network. Ebay pulled all their adwords from Google and Google quickly folded the party plans. Ebay was able to leverage Google off their back but for this domain party, I am not sure what leverage the Traffic conference has.

I have to say I was disappointed with the party though. It would be nice if everything was coordinated and companies were not holding parties at the same times as other events. I think everyone loses in this situation. When I arrived at this party, it took an hour to get a drink and I felt like a sardine boxed in the roped offed area of the roof top. Then it started to rain and I knew that someone at the Traffic conference had paid the rain Gods off. Why have a party on the roof when it can rain on your head. Yuck. After the thousand other people left the night club I was finally able to talk in a normal voice and I got my first drink. I headed back to the Grand Hyatt and had an interesting conversation with GoDaddy and Demand Media about what the two companies are up to. We finished off the night with excellent New York street dogs at 1am in the morning.