ICANN Wiki Mural from the San Francisco Meeting

nTLD Brand Monitoring with DomainTools

DomainTools is well-known for Whois data: whois lookup, whois history, and reverse whois reports. But we also have a lot of other cool products that savvy clients utilize all the time. Many of those products deal with domain names and DNS data, rather than strictly whois data.

Brand Monitor is a perfect example. This product reviews new domain name registrations for brands and trademarks chosen by our clients. Today we are excited to launch a significant expansion to that product, allowing our clients for the first time to monitor their brands across a much larger footprint of TLDs.

The first brand monitoring product we built many years ago only covered the biggest gTLDs with zone files: com, net, org, biz, info and us. Access to zone files allows us to definitively know that a new domain exists. So if Yahoo wants to monitor all the domains that get registered every day with the string ‘yahoo’ in it, they can do so in these TLDs. The counterpoint exists for TLDs (mostly ccTLDs) that do not publish zone files: for example if someone registered ‘yahoostinks.de’, the only groups that would know about that domain registration would be the registrant, the registrar, and DENIC.

See DomainTools Data in a Whole New Light with Domain Report

Transformative Digital Products

I have a passion for digital products and their ability to transform how we communicate, how we do business, and even how we live.

Perhaps that’s why I feel a sharp pain in my head every time I see someone print out a web page or an email. It feels like a step backwards, and I can barely resist the temptation to expound on all the wonderful experiences they’re missing by reverting to such arcane practices.

Once, I visited someone in a corporate office whom I had been emailing instructions to. I asked them to please click the link I had included in my last email, and then watched in horror as they pulled down a three-ring binder with printouts of every email I had sent them, organized by date, complete with tabs and color-coded highlighting.

She was very proud; I nearly wept.

And so, it may surprise you that I’ve been one of the most stalwart champions and one of the principal designers of the new Domain Report product that we’re launching today. It certainly surprises me.