Saturday morning I was abruptly awakened because my alarm didn’t go off. I had a 7:30am flight to catch so my brain was in freak out mode!

A few minutes later I realized I had set my phone alarm for the weekday and not the weekend….oops. It takes about 1 1/2 hours to get to the airport from where I live so I was out of luck since I woke up at 5:45am. I made a quick call to Southwest and rescheduled my flight for 10:25am and got out the door a few hours later.

To make things worse, the laptop I borrowed from my girlfriend for the weekend would crap out while trying to use the internet. Plus, the drivers weren’t installed for my Verizon Broadband card. So I paid $9 only to struggle with the internet not working.

I’ve been out in Nampa, ID since Saturday and haven’t really had any internet access until today when I actually had some time to get the laptop issue fixed.

So, here I am, waiting at the Boise airport with a few other people in a big empty building. I got the drivers setup for the Verizon Broadband card so I don’t have to pay for “Free Wireless”.

Had a pretty good weekend in terms of work though. I flew down here for business and managed to get a decent amount of stuff accomplished. Unfortunately I’m not a big camera guy so I didn’t take any pictures while I was here except right now at the airport (above). I need to work on that. Don’t worry though, you aren’t missing anything (it’s just desert down here).

So, in a few hours I’ll be back to Moscow and back to work!

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Domain names… had I known years ago just how valuable they would be today, I would have spent my high school years working for money to invest in buying domains. But are we past the point that it’s too late? I don’t think so.

It seems like every week I hear about a domain name being sold for a ridiculously high price. At some point those domains were picked up for less than the cost of your Starbucks coffee. Pizza.com sold for $2.6 million by a some average guy that bought it back in the 90’s. Domain names as simple as Pizza.com have long been taken, but there are still some .COM names out there.

The prime domain name real estate in the .COM arena has been taken (for the most part) but there are still some left. What about .NET, .ORG, .EDU and other domain name extensions? They are going fast but there are still a huge number of them available because they aren’t “prime real estate”….yet.

Over the last year I have been picking up domain names I find that are clever or will or already have some value. I fully intend on continuing to do so and expanding into other domain extensions like .US, .CA, etc. very soon. The price for domain names is going up and will continue to do so.

I think what bugs me the most is that so many people just assume when they need a domain name, it will be there for them. Those people will be stuck with the domains nobody wants like 7×6gl4.co.uk or something similarly crappy. Companies are investing in domain names because they know what is happening.

Try doing a search to see if you can get your last name in the .COM (”yourlastname”.com). Good luck, if your’s is available let me know because if you don’t buy it I will. These companies are picking up thousands of domains for dirt cheap, then turning around and selling them for 100-1000x what they paid. Even people’s names.

I won’t be left behind while all these are being slurped up. My only regret will be that I couldn’t invest more money.

Want to hear some crazy facts about domain names and the domain name industry? Check this out:

• A single person owns over 200,000 domain names. (Dr. Lieven P. Van Neste)
• Business.com sold for $7.5 million.
• Every last 3 character domain name (for .COM) has been taken.
• The average length of domain names is 11 characters long.
• More domains begin with an “S” than any other letter.
• More domains begin with a “1″ than any other digit.
• The longest domain you can get is 63 characters long.

While there are still many options available to get yourself a cool domain name, the prime real estate is being swept up fast, prices are going up and the number of people starting websites will continue to rise. If you’re wondering where to start, you might want to read the “5 Step Website / Blog Setup Guide” post I made awhile ago.

Another post worth reading is “Are Domain Names Digital Real Estate?”.

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This post was guest blogged by Simon Koldyk

Jarel just recently started on Twitter.com; but, I think we might of gotten him hooked. If you haven’t already go and sign-up on Twitter.com with your name even if you don’t think you want to Twitter just yet, your name might get taken later.

There are a couple of keys to Twitter

• Its always a lot more fun to be following a bunch of people
• Don’t worry about how many people are following you
• Post interesting stuff, I don’t care that you just went to the bathroom
• Twitter is for conversations remember to use the @ command.

The conversations that go on twitter are amazing, everything people are thinking about is brought up and interesting things turn into huge Twitter conversations that can span on to hundreds of people. In twitter you could type “@personsusername say something here” and Twitter will treat that as your talking to them.

There are a few people that I think you should be following.

• photomatt - Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress
• johnchowdotcom - John Chow from TheTechZone
• problogger - Darren Rowse from ProBlogger
  
• TechCrunch - Micheal Arrighton from TechCrunch
• Scobleizer - Robert Scoble from FastCompany
• JasonsCalacanis - Jason Calacanis from Mahalo
• factoryjoe - Chris Messina from Citizen Agency

Once you have a few people you like following you want to use Twubble, it’s this neat little website that finds you new friends that you will probably also want to follow. Twubble gets this information from who you are already following and who they follow.

So now you’ve a few people you’re following and hopefully a few people are now following you back, you can’t always be checking Twitter.com or you’ll waste your whole day away. Thankfully some really smart people have created desktop apps - the two big ones are Twitterific (Mac) and Twhirl (Windows & Mac). Tweets will not show up on your desktop as they appear, although I do warn you that you may need to turn this off time to time to actually get some work done. Twitter is the new place for fast information and connections.

You should also follow Jarel and myself on Twitter

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I just can’t seem to find enough time in the day. Day after day passes by in the blink of an eye and I’m sitting there at the end of each day thinking, “Wow, where did the day go?”. I hardly have time to blog, work on my personal projects or even make it to the gym often enough.

It seems like the last I knew it was January! I made a goal to post once per day but in the last 1 1/2 weeks that was thrown right out the window.

It would really help if we could increase the days to 36 hours! I get up at 7am and work from 8-5pm (at a newspaper, no slacker blogging ). Then I get home and eat before my stomach devours itself and get to work on whatever the project is I’m working on (been logo’s this week).

Then I try to hit the gym if I can find time (really gets rid of stress). Then in the last part of the night I am left with a little bit of time to actually blog or work on my the site.

It’s that darned twitter! All the little things around the net that just gobble up those precious minutes…they’re like drugs!

I’ve decided if I can find a few people who want to do a guest post here and there then that would be fun and I might have a little extra time now and then to get some work done. If you’re interested please use the contact page to get a hold of me. I will then fill you in on the details.

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Do you think newspapers ever sit there and wonder why they are slowly dying? I would doubt it as the last two I have worked for are too caught up in sacrificing any and all genuine quality and value of the publications they produce to make a quick dollar.

It’s interesting how such large players in the media industry could be so ignorant. Your readers are the same as the customers walking into a store. Without them you are nothing. The customer is always right.

So why is it that newspapers produce so many publications that are utter crap? Something that hardly nobody picks up to read. The majority of special sections I see produced are essentially a giant advertisement and provide nearly no real valuable reading content.

That goes to show that they don’t really care. They are in the survival mentality and staring at their feet so they don’t trip and go down. What they should be doing is looking at the path ahead and building a reputation of quality reading publications.

If you care about what you print, you’ll make sure it’s quality and it will show. People will read it and people will care (especially small communities). But when you care more about making money, it will show and people won’t like you.

So give a crap about what you produce and as a byproduct, you’re going to make money. But produce crap and as a byproduct you’ll ultimately fail.

This way of thinking is quite obvious in the blogging world. Trends come and go quite quickly on the internet and the print world could take a few lessons from the online world.

Open your eyes newspapers and get with the program.

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I signed up for Twitter recently to see what all the fuss was about and quite frankly, I still don’t see what the big deal is.

I don’t really care for it much but maybe I need to spend more time on it to actually catch the twitter bug. 

So, you’re supposed to just post what you’re doing right? Update as you go through your daily tasks? Why exactly would I want to keep everyone up to date on what I’m doing right now? I mean, should I update that I’m going to go poop?

So Twitter is supposed to be like a micro-blog. So far, what I like about it is that some of the bloggers I follow (ProBlogger, JohnChow, DoshDosh, ShoeMoney, etc.) sometimes use Twitter to let people know they are working on a new blog post, or to ask a question, or even just shout out to their followers about something cool they found. 

So it definitely has it’s uses…I’m just not totally convinced it’s all that great. That could be because I am only following a few people at the moment or that none of my friends are using it or that nobody is really following me.  

So here’s what I gather I’ll be using Twitter for:

• A source for news (quicker than blogs)
• A place I can ask a quick question and get a pretty quick response
• A status report for my far far away friends (soon, they aren’t on it right now)
• A form of letting my followers (maybe more soon?) know what I’m going to be posting next, working on currently, when I’m using the toilet (I kid, I kid! ) or any other “important” update
• A place to tell people about something funny or interesting that happened or that I found
• Lastly, I’ll setup my phone to twitter while I’m at WinCo….a micro-rant! Stupid Sucks!

I’m sure there are tons of other uses for Twitter out there, if you have one (or many) please share…because if Twitter really is so freaking amazing, I’d like to be in on the fun!

Here’s a cool list of 50+ Guides, Hacks & Scripts for Twitter. While you’re at it why don’t you follow me on Twitter!

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