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Geolocation and Domains Extensions - Is your airport code going to be the next big thing?

By Lisa on October 18, 2010 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is big buzz on the internet these days about Geolocation. Wikipedia says:
"Geolocation is the identification of the real-world geographic location of an object, such as a cell phone or an Internet-connected computer terminal. Geolocation may refer to the practice of assessing the location, or to the actual assessed location."

From an internet marketing and mobile marketing aspect, geolocation is about identifying where you are and then filtering data so you get information that relevant to you.

Mobile apps such as FourSquare and Yelp utilize the GPS information from your cell phone to make recommendations about businesses around you.

Services such as Groupon (the group coupon phenom) have you choose the city that you want to receive deals from.

In the old days (last year or the year before), the country code domain extensions were one way to experience geolocation. When you go to bell.ca or sainsburys.co.uk you know which country that company is providing services for. .ca also had the ability to break the name down into provinces - sk.ca, bc.ca, on.ca and so on.

Now here's what I was thinking - let's take geolocation in domain names a step further. Let's say I have a small business in Portland or Vancouver. I have my .com or my .ca but I want to dominate my market. It would be nice to refine my location even further by using city names. But typing joesflowers.vancouver or decksrus.portland would drive most users bonkers.

I suggest that we take all those delightful airport codes that we know and love, and turn them into high performing domain extensions. Vancouver is YVR and Portland is PDX and that would give us Joesflowers.yvr and decksrus.pdx. Neat!

If you want to be the king of coffee for St. Anthony's Newfoundland then coffeeking.yay is the answer. Farnborough UK is your estate agencies patch? Priemierestates.fab is just the ticket.

So SFOites, YYZ peeps and JFKsters, stand up and say "I ♥ my airport code" and maybe ICANN will listen.

(Image: We borrowed this terrific image of airport code patches from the super cool SternLab. Read the related blog post here.)

A Recap of Northern Voice 2010

By Max on May 13, 2010 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The 6th annual Northern voice personal blogging and social media conference took place this past Friday and Saturday at the University of British Columbia. I attended once again; although I was unable to go on Friday, Saturday's experience was no less awesome.

The conference got a LOT bigger this year, and as such the organizers moved into the high-tech Life Sciences building on the UBC campus. This building was great for the talks, and Q&A style portions of the conference as the lecture theaters are fully equipped. They had crazy projectors, and one of the rooms even had a built in PA system with microphones set up at each seat; very nice!

This year's keynote speaker Chris Messina put on a charismatic and impassioned talk about the open web, where the Internet heading and what the Internet can become. His style incorporated interesting personal anecdotes and observations from the industry at large.

Then, there were the sessions, and really only two of the Saturday sessions stuck in my mind. The first real interesting one was "A Four Letter Word For Sex", which I won't describe much more then that, as the topics were a little on the taboo side. Yet, the subject sparked a very interesting Q&A session, with some smart and provocative questions for the panelists. Funny enough, one of the panelists couldn't make it, as they came down with Mono.

Also new to this year's conference - the Northern Voice organizers filmed everything to make it available online. In fact they streamed most of it live as it was happening. So if you missed the conference, but wanted to hear the speakers, fret not because it all will be available online in a little while. In the meantime, you will have to make do perusing Flickr sets and photos submitted to the Northern Voice Flickr group.

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Recently in Personal Brand Category

Geolocation and Domains Extensions - Is your airport code going to be the next big thing?

A Recap of Northern Voice 2010

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