Back in the 90s, it was a good thing to have your own dot com domain. But that isn’t good enough for some companies, and over the summer ICANN made it possible for you to purchase your own global top level domain (gTLD) for the mere sum of at least $185,000. Now we have dotFamilyName getting into the action and promising your own gTLD for “as little as $500,000” for your family, to provide the ultimate cachet for the ultra-wealthy. Yes, you read that right. Half a million, for a set of domains that cost at best $30 a year.

When I got the press release today, I first thought it was a joke. But no, this company really thinks it has a business model here. “Only” 1000 gTLDs will be created, and only after filing a 200-page application.

Is this the “apex of the Internet” or the most exclusive or unique luxury digital item you can think of? Perhaps not, but it certainly the most ridiculous. The company promises “a state of the art security system for your personal reputation.” Harumph. We’ll see how long it takes before one of their gTLD domains gets hit by a denial of service attack.

But if any of you want to sponsor a .strom gTLD, you know where to find me in the rest of cyberspace that the common folk hang out in. (And no, I am not talking about AOL.)

Lots of memories of my computing past flooding through me this morning, and no, this won’t be another Jobs tribute. But a post yesterday on RWW talking about whether you were using the Internet back in 1995 brought me back to that era, and I thought it would be a good time to show how much progress we have made in the 16-some years and what businesses were doing with the Internet back then.

Actually, I first started communicating on the Internet back in the late 1980s, and when I started Network Computing magazine in the summer of 1990 I was determined for all of our writers to have Internet email addresses. Back then there weren’t any dot coms other than the research organizations that built the Internet and some universities. We were fortunate to work with a computing team at UCLA (which is where one of the first Internet nodes was established, BTW) and they had an email gateway so each of our editors could get Internet emails, along with Compuserve and MCIMail too. Those gateways were extremely buggy: someone sent an attachment that was 350 kB or so, and that clogged things up on the gateway until we could delete the message. Good times.

The most popular email product was something called cc:Mail, which was eventually bought and killed by Lotus and now largely forgotten.

Anyway, in 1995 we had the second version of graphical Web browsers, and this is where the Web began to really take off. Several print publications that I worked for at the time were setting up their first websites. I wrote reviews of “groupware” (what we called the first primitive social networking products, such as Lotus Notes and Novell’s GroupWise) and Web server software. Prodigy and Compuserve still had more people connected to their proprietary networks than the regular Internet. At the time, the Web was still more curiosity than mission-critical. One of my sources, a corporate IT manager, said that the web is “plagued with the teenage sex syndrome, ‘Everyone is interested in it, but they don’t know what to do’.” Others at the time said that “you don’t use a Web page to sell sofas.” Now my interior designer wife routinely buys and sells furniture for her clients online.

Back in 1995, there weren’t any broadband connections. The best you could do, short of paying hundreds of dollars a month for a dedicated digital phone line, was ISDN, which offered at most 100 kbps and wasn’t easy to setup. Business phone lines had to pay per minute for each call to your Internet service provider, which meant you were careful how much time you used on your connection, unless you purchased your own T-1. And unlike today’s modern OS’s that came with IP protocol stacks, we had to cobble things together with third-party add-on software that was idiosyncratic at best. Products from companies such as NetManage Chameleon and Frontier Technologies.

In the fall of 1995 I started my weekly email newsletter: a project that I continue to contribute to this very day. Email newsletters have come and gone but they still are the bread and butter of many businesses today. (This article will be cross-posted to that list later today.) Back then I used a Unix server and some complex command strings and FTP to post each issue to my mailing list.

At the same time, I built my first website, running on Windows NT with IIS v4 and Cold Fusion. Back then this was the best way to serve up dynamic content and to combine databases and the Web. We didn’t have WordPress, we didn’t have Java, we didn’t know from CSS. It was straight HTML and that was pretty much it. Even then Netscape (the ancestor to Mozilla) was trying to wrest control of the browser from Microsoft, and had introduced their proprietary extensions to HTML. Some things never change.

Who were the big companies back in the 1995 era Internet? Sun, Cisco and Novell come to mind. Sun is now part of Oracle, Novell is a shadow of its former self, and Cisco has acquired 75 companies since then, or so it seems.

The wireless data industry was also a very different place back then. RIM was just getting started, and their devices hadn’t yet caught on – clunky text-based things barely evolved from pagers. Cellular modems were available for PCs but expensive affairs and the connections were unreliable. UPS, the package delivery company, had just outfitted all of its trucks with them so they could track deliveries. Some improvement there.

So when you plug in your Wifi-enabled laptop down at the local coffee shop and fire up your Chrome browser at blazing speeds to update your WordPress site, think of where we have come from back then.

Those St. Louisans looking to find something to remind them of Vegas don’t have to venture very far from home, nor gamble their nest egg downtown, especially if they are interested in thrilling water fountain displays. I am talking about our own fountain on Maryland Plaza, which was designed by Wet Design, the Burbank-based team that did many of Sin City’s fabulous water displays at the Bellagio and City Center complexes. You can also see several of their fountains around the state, including one inside the Ameristar Casino in St. Charles and an outdoor display at the Branson Landing shopping complex.

Our CWE fountain sits in front of what was Design Within Reach and is soon to be a new home furnishings store called 10Denza that is set to open soon. In the basement of the store are the pumpworks and controls that are used to make the magic of the fountain, and we got an exclusive tour by the building’s management. (See some of the photos here of the various machinery involved.) There are a series of three main water pumps, recirculating tanks, computer control systems and lighting electronics. There is a lot of piping to handle all the various sprayers and decorative features, as you can see. The city water is augmented by a bromide solution to reduce algae growth, as any pool owner can attest. There are also a variety of filters and strainers to prevent various objects from clogging up the waterworks.

The fountain is composed of a basin with an inner ring of 16 streaming narrow-focused jets complimented by an outer ring of 40 arching streams. The jets can reach 15 feet in the air, close to the top of the Mandarin outdoor lounge directly above. Actually, they can go much higher but have turned down because of safety issues with spraying too many people or cars if were set on their full strength. The sprayers also detect wind conditions and can shut off automatically in high winds.

There are four pre-set “programs” of varying lengths that combine both lighting and fanciful water displays. These are set manually by one of the maintenance workers or by Ted Koplar himself, using the control systems pictured here. As one grandparent told us as we were doing our interviews, the fountain is a big destination for their grandkids during the warmer months.

The fountain was paid for by the Koplar organization and replaced an older and much more staid model that was located in the middle of Maryland Plaza street. The current one is of course part of the sidewalk and much more pedestrian-friendly, indeed, too friendly as there have been incidents with broken glasses and other objects tossed into it. More than $100 of coins are also collected by the fountain, which are donated to charity when the fountain is cleaned. It goes through its annual maintenance cycle during the winter months, where the water features are turned off and a sculpture or tree is placed on top of the base.

(Link to original blog post)

The story behind Stuxnet, the malware targeted at an Iranian nuclear processing station, has been known in general since last fall when a team of researchers at Symantec released this document, which we covered at the time in our article here. But seeing is believing. I had a chance to attend a special briefing at Symantec’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. where Patrick Gardner, a director in their security group, actually showed us what was involved. It was a real thrill.

You can read my post in ReadWrite here from June 2011.

Are you looking for some interesting summer reading material? These recommendations are ready to take to the beach, or just entertaining yarns (and some true tales thrown in to for good measure). They also make great gifts for your favorite nerd. Read my article in SearchWindowsSever.com. 

Not to mention that it is perfect for IT degree enthusiasts.

Everyone may think they are experts on social media, but we all still have a lot to learn. While the best way for a CMO to get better at social media is to use it more frequently to listen to your customers and partners, sometimes there is nothing better than reading a few good books on the topic to better master the subject. Here I review a few of my favorites.

Many business books lose steam after the first couple of chapters, but these books are filled with plenty of great advice, examples of companies that have done well with using social media, and real solid information that you can build your own social media marketing strategies from.

If you are still wondering what to do with Twitter, then start with Shel Israel’s “Twitterville.” While written two years ago (ancient in the Twitterverse, as it is called), it chronicles the early attempts by Comcast, Dell, and the arrest of James Buck in Egypt back in April 2008 all show you how far the social microblogging site has come. Israel writes well and his first book “Naked Conversations” is somewhat of a go-to book in the field. In this book he shows how over the course of a single weekend a group of stay-at-home moms organized to protest Johnson&Johnson’s Motrin commercials while the corporate PR folks stayed out of the picture. By Monday morning there were hundreds of text and video posts about the ads. As soon as J&J got involved and apologized, the crowds were mollified. But still the image of being insensitive is a black mark on J&J. Twitterville has lots more examples of both these early successes and failures.

Israel is hard at work on his next book where he will take additional interviews from early social media pioneers. He clearly is someone to stay in touch with and learn from.

Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, Shel Israel, 2009, Penguin Group ($24)

If you get a chance to see and hear Jonathan Baskin in person, then by all means do so: he is a wonderful speaker with some rather zany and creative ideas that will stimulate your thinking. And his “Histories of Social Media” builds on these ideas and is a very unique effort. Where else can you find a book on social media that covers the French Revolution, the rules of dueling (bloggers), Elks and other fraternal organizations (the first Facebookers), Milton Berle’s early TV variety shows (media sponsorship), the early age of exploration, and more. In each case, Baskin draws analogs with today’s social media technologies, showing how they have engaged audiences, captured groups of like-minded individuals, and created opportunities for communication and conversation. Sadly, the book is not very well written, but it is worth buying nonetheless to examine some of the many ideas that Baskin puts forth. He asks more questions that he answers about how to best use social media in the modern context, but by bringing them up he makes you probe your own assumptions about the use of the technology and understand better the historical context.

Histories of Social Media, Jonathan Salem Baskin, 2010, SNCR.org Press  ($23)

After you have read the first two books you are ready to move on to what Gillin and Schwartzman have done in their book. This is focused completely on marketing to business customers, and it is filled with tips, tools, tactics, and other very practical suggestions. It is a great complement to the first two books and gets down to brass tacks in each chapter. Want to understand how organic search plays into social media? Be able to track Twitter mentions of your company and products? Choose the right place to launch a new product? Understand the difference between Joomla and WordPress for setting up your blog? Want to craft your company’s social media corporate policy? Then this is the book for you.

Social Marketing to the Business Customer, Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman, 2011, Wiley and Sons.  ($28)

Last week I had an opportunity to spend some time with Andy Carvin. He is a journalist with National Public Radio who broke the story of the fake Syrian lesbian blogger “Amina Abdullah”. You might have seen him briefly on The Daily Show, and the story is an amazing hoax that finally broke apart with a lot of investigation.

The blogger, as it turns out, was actually neither Syrian nor a lesbian, but the genesis of a married couple living in Scotland: Tom MacMaster and Britta Froelicher, the latter an expert on Syria.

And while it is true that on the Internet, no one knows you are a dog; in this case, a lot of people helped Carvin finally figure piece together the dogs’ identities. There are some important lessons for online journalists here, and those thinking about becoming or continuing in this trade in the coming years.

First off, Carvin uses Twitter as his personal assignment editor. He tracks trends and does lots of searches and posts queries to stay on top of what could potentially be news, or to direct his own research. Twitter makes this both easy and hard, because a lot of what is posted or retweeted can be just noise. It helps to have fined honed instincts here.

Second, he archives and collects the elements of his stories in Storify.com, which is a tool that can be used to snapshot Tweets and blog posts and pictures so you can see the particular moment in time that he is researching. If you haven’t yet used Storify, it is worth taking a look here.

You can see Carvin building a case that Amina was phony and how he tracked down who “she” really was – asking his Twitter correspondents whether anyone actually meet her face to face or over video chat.(McMaster was clever and often stated that the Syrian authorities were blocking Skype videos, something that was patently false.) This the way new style of reporting, and what is intriguing for me is that you can see how the pieces came together in uncovering the hoax merely by scrolling from the bottom to the top (it is a lot of scrolling, granted, but all the more impressive showing how doggedly Carvin pursued things). Back in the olden days, we just had phone calls and hastily scribbled note pads. Storify is the reporter’s new notepad.

Third, social media is both a blessing and a curse. Rumors can spread like wildfire, and truth can be hard to come by. One of the reasons that the Amina hoax persisted is that McMaster was a terrific writer, able to get into the voice and perspective of his part. McMaster also used gay dating sites to establish a relationship with a real lesbian in Montreal, which I guess was used to build his street cred for his character. Reporters have to understand the multiplier effect of social media and treat this carefully, or they could fall into the trap that many of them did in their original reporting of Amina’s phony kidnapping. You have to dig deeper and be persistent. You also have to treat your sources with a lot more care, because we are dealing with real human relationships here – no matter if they are online ones.

Finally, there is this paradox: as reporters such as Carvin build massive Twitter followings (he is nearly at 50,000), they become their own independent brands. NPR has been terrific in letting him operate independently, but other organizations may not be as tolerant. We still don’t have the best models for how businesses can transfer or use the popularity of their superstars.

Ironically, Carvin, like myself, has never had any formal journalism school training. Perhaps that is a sign of things to come as well.