The beauty of monopoly is you can charge what you want. But if you are a consumer its not so great. For users contemplating buying a .COM or .NET that monopoly is controlled by VeriSign, Inc. At the end of last year, they annouced increases coming into effect as of July 1st 2010. The registry fee for .com domain names will increase from $6.86 to $7.34 and that the registry fee for .net domain names will increase, from $4.23 to $4.65. One of the largest domain registrars Godaddy reminded their users of the impending price increase with an  email on Thursday:

On July 1, 2010, VeriSign®, the registry for .COM and .NET, will increase prices – .COM will go up 7%, and .NET by 10%.

The increase will be passed to registrars like Go Daddy and then, unfortunately, to consumers like you.

As of July 1, we will be forced to raise registration and renewal prices for these two popular top-level domains.

If you wish to avoid this price increase, you can renew your domain names by June 30 and add another year to your current expiration dates. You have the option to register or renew for multiple years and lock in long-term savings.

While the time  to grab the name you want before the price increases come into effect, Morningstar Credit Committee has some interesting comments to consider. We have bolded the important parts:

Morningstar is initiating credit coverage of VeriSign VRSN with an issuer rating of A, reflecting the firm’s solid Cash Flow Cushion, offset somewhat by uncertainty surrounding its core Internet address registration business. Our biggest concern about VeriSign is that the contract granting its monopoly in the Internet address registration business expires in 2012. In addition, the firm faces an antitrust lawsuit tied to this contract brought by the Coalition for ICANN Transparency. The range of possible outcomes around this lawsuit is wide. The firm could be forced to charge lower fees for its naming services, or it could lose the contract after 2012.

So we recommend you either buy your name you have been considering before June 30th, or wait until 2012 and see how things pan out.  Regardless of what you decide make sure you search for some coupons online before you pay full price for your domains. We prefer Retailmenot.com, a great place to make sure you save a couple of bucks. Happy bargain hunting!

We wanted to wait a bit before we commented on Google’s newest release: Google Buzz. While it’s interesting as a concept for keeping in touch with family and friends, from a marketing perspective we think its something to pass on. By integrating it so closely with one’s email,  people are more skeptical to follow those they don’t know. Its also not uncommon for many users to have their social network segmented into different compartments online, and Google Buzz seems to take this away. And while Google did get 150 Million users by making Google Buzz opt-in, most of the adopters of this type of technology are already into Twitter, and have  no interest in a second account, that (for now) they need to update separately.

Then there is the whole privacy fiasco faced by Google Buzz. It has turned off many users who have opted-out and will likely never opt back in.  And as the bad press continues it does not help their case in getting users to to adopt this new tool. Google themselves took the feedback, and  made several changes. Nevertheless, some of the changes are draconian, like you can opt out of Buzz, but then your whole Google Profile is deleted.  Personally, I think Google should examine a separate domain for Google Buzz like Twitter, and make it optional for your “buzzes” to be made available in Gmail.

Nevertheless, one area of Google Buzz is making some headway. Many sites are now adding a Google Buzz button next to their Tweetmeme integration. You can see it in action at Mashable for example.  Mashable is a blog focused on social media and has over 2.3 Million followers. Actually Mashable is the perfect lab to follow the integration of Google Buzz. Below is an example of their share area for an article:

As you can see, (and all over their site), Google Buzz trails Twitter and Facebook. It might change in the future, but for now Google Buzz has not got the same penetration. We still suggest you have your brand name as a Google Account, but beyond this, Google Buzz is not something essential for your marketing plan.

If you search Google for the word “GoDaddy Sucks” you’ll get a lot of responses, but you’d get just as many results (if not more) for “Any Host You Want” and the word “Sucks”. I can tell you having used GoDaddy for more than 7 years and worked on over 50 sites hosted there, the issue is not always GoDaddy. More often then not its a configuration error, either by the user or the script they are using.

Recently, we got reminded of this fact on this WordPress powered blog. We  upgraded one of our WordPress Plugins which changed some previous functionality. Using it  in an improper way lead us to have random 404 and 500 server page errors. It stumped us for  the last 2 days. We even thought the stories of : “How GoDaddy is a horrible host” had finally caught up to us. We began to draft an email to GoDaddy support to complain. Thankfully we found the plugin issue ourselves before we hit send. How did we discover it? We disabled every plugin we had ( which is over 30 and counting) and re-enabled each one by one until we were able to detect/replicate the issue. Now that it is fixed our site is running smooth again, and there was tinge of guilt for our blame on the host–the easy scape goat.

So remember, while everyone has horror stories, this is true with any service. People are always more likely to complain then to write about a positive experience (especially without an affiliate link). I can honestly say, having used several other hosts, (all the ones you can think of), GoDaddy is great and a fine option for most needs. So before you bash a host, take it from us, it might not be the host but something as simple as an errant use of a WordPress plugin.

Weird. All night we have seen TweetMeme up and down on our blog. But it seems its finally out for the count at around 10 PM. It’s dead at Mashable and Twitter has “Tweetmeme Down” as a trending topic. It also seems like they are also getting lots of Tweet spam sent to the @tweetmeme account. No major words form other blogs about what is going on. Thankfully we have enabled BackTypes Retweet WordPress Plugin, a very capable competitior to Tweetmeme. We suggest you give them a shot. In the meantime we will update this post as the news develops.

****
Update #1

Tweetmeme finally has message to users:

The Tweetmeme status blog notes the following: “The main site is currently still down, but we have identified the issue and will be back and fully operational soon.”

***
Update # 2

The Tweetmeme status blog now notes the following: “We’re currently in holding, which means buttons are temporarily paused and the site is unavailable – we’ll be back and running smoothly as soon as we can.”

Funny- main updates come from Tweetmeme at their blog, not via Twitter.

Update #3
Still no “major” blog reporting the Tweetmeme outage. We will update in the morning when we learn what happened or any other important updates. You can follow Tweetmeme status here until then. We wish the Tweetmeme team good luck on getting back up. Its a great tool and wish them a speedy recovery.

*****
Update# 4

Early this morning (February 6th) Tweetmeme came back online. The Tweetmeme status blog reports:

“We have identified the problem that caused the general outage on Friday 5th February and applied a fix. The buttons, API and site are now all fully functional again.

Button counts may still be lagged as we restore our data processing systems to full strength and process the back-log. No tweets have been lost, we expect they will be attributed to your buttons within several hours.

Just to clarify, this was a fault with our internal systems. There has been no security breach and no data has been lost or jeopardized.”

We’re glad to see Tweetmeme back up and running…

In Quebec, a province in Canada, there are strict rules about operating a website in the province. You must offer a bilingual site (French and English) to customers if you do business in the province or are resided in that province. Actually the website content must be in French, but English is optional, as French is the official language in the province of Quebec. Failing to comply with the rules, can run you afoul of Office Quebecoise de la language francaise and possible fines and sanctions.

So what do you do if you are a small business without the resource to create a French site? Thankfully Google offers you some solutions other then spending a small fortune in translation services. Below are the solutions and the scripts you need:

1- Translate all the pages

This is the more time consuming solution by if you visit Google Translate, you can enter your site text, visit your website url, or upload your documents/web pages. Instantly Google will translate your files into French. Of course this is a machine translation, but it will give you the ability to come pretty close. If you know someone who reads/writes French, this will quicken the turn around time in translating your site. We recommend you add your French pages to a subfolder on your sever (i.e http://www.yoursite.com/fr).

2- Offer Translation Tool on Index

A quick solution is offering Google’s translation tool on your pages. Just use the below code.

<div id="google_translate_element"></div><script>
function googleTranslateElementInit() {
  new google.translate.TranslateElement({
    pageLanguage: 'en',
    includedLanguages: 'en,fr'
  }, 'google_translate_element');
}
</script><script src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>

3- Use .HTACCESS file to redirect based on browser language.
Using an .HTACCESS file, you can detect the language of the visitors browser. If a visitor has a French version of Firefox, Chrome or IE when coming to your site the site will be translated to French automatically using Google. If they come to with an English language browser, they will not notice a difference. All you need to do is replace “www.englishsite.com” in this code with your domain name. Sure to save file as .HTACCESS filetype.

The other option is this code which will create sub-folder for each language. English users will be taken to www.yoursite.com/en unless they are using a French browser. In this case they will be taken to www.yoursite.com/fr.

So there you go! Three quick solutions to get your site in French fast and keep your Quebec customer happy. Now you may ask why we did not offer an IP blocking solution. Unfortunately, its just not efficient. For example, you would need to keep an updated IP list for all users in Quebec. This is a major issue, because there are always new IP addresses. Furthermore how do you identify users in Quebec with ISP’s in Ontario or for that matter those visitors using a proxy?

The best solution in our view is to start with solution # 2 or 3 above, while you work on using solution #1. A we have mentioned earlier, sometimes you just have to spend the money on website design. Having a fully translated website is the best way to increase your revenue from a local market and the most professional way to present your site. Most of all, we hope the above solutions helps cash-strapped (small) businesses in Quebec (or elsewhere) facing issues in translation.