Firetop

A couple of years ago somebody telephoned Firetop and claimed that the children’s books I’d allegedly sponsored were now ready for collection and they wanted payment. When I confronted them with the fact that I hadn’t ordered them, they said somebody else at Firetop must have done… to which I was able to reply - ‘there isn’t anybody else at Firetop’. The lady on the phone threatened to take legal action and I wished her the best of luck after she said that she was from Child Protection UK Ltd of Denton, Manchester (she even phoned back to say she’d made a mistake and they weren’t a registered company - hanging up and swearing when I started reading out the address). Since then I have gone on to blog about this experience and it led to a lot of feedback from other victims of similar bogus calls involving ‘sponsored books’ for schools. (more…)

I’ve been letting a lot of my registered domain names go over recent years, keeping just the very best ones with earning potential. It’s easy to waste money on a bad domain - not so easy to make money from the good ones unless you know how. I learned a lot about domains during my 2004 domain research project, these days my remaining fifty domains are earning a nice income using the Sedo domain parking service. By pointing domains at Sedo, domain ‘guessers’ or ‘direct typers’ are presented with relevant Google adverts - and I get paid a click commission. With around 30% of people clicking through it’s not a bad way to make a living in your sleep - whilst providing a helpful service. (more…)

Sometimes I get asked why I decided to call my company Firetop Ltd; there were two factors influencing this decision. Firstly, I needed a name that was applicable to getting people to the ‘top’ of search engine results, since this was the original web marketing service provided through optimisation techniques or pay per click advertising. ‘Fire’ ‘Top’ seemed to be suitably gimmicky, memorable and short for typing. In addition I was able to register the relevant company and domain names whilst purchasing firetop.com from a ‘wizard workshop’ guy in the US. The reason a ‘wizardy’ guy owned Firetop in the first place does tie in with the second influencing factor. (more…)

An update on the frustrating downtime this morning. I upgraded the server last week to include a more robust managed back-up system, this meant the folks at Rackspace had to move the server to a new location (with a new IP address). I asked them to do this at midnight this morning to minimise inconvenience for all. However… they forgot to update all of the IP addresses on the domain A records so they were still pointing to the old server IP address up until about 7:30am when I contacted the technical support staff to identify the problem. (more…)

This week I discovered the fantastic Drum ‘n’ Bass channel on Digitally Imported - yet another fantastic Internet radio stream from these guys. It might have been available a while; perhaps it’s only my recent ‘Global Gathering‘ trip down memory lane that’s prompted me to go ‘old skool’ and pay attention to it. I was wondering where the domain ending ‘.FM’ came from, since .TV is managed on behalf of the islands of Tuvalu (which incidentally are sinking due to global warming). (more…)

In mid 2004 I went through a process of registering some sample domain names, based upon popular search terms, to try and calculate how many people ‘guess’ domain names in their browser address bar. This led me to make several conclusions about the best format for a domain name… and in the process I became convicted as an official cybersquatter thanks to AXA and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). Two years later my accusers havent even bothered to renew the domain they challenged me for and its now held by somebody else with a page full of ads and pop-ups! Whats that all about?

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