13 Ways To Improve Your Domain Trend Spotting

Searching for the newest global trends is a relentless and time consuming task. All over the world, each minute of the day, new trends are emerging that unsuspecting consumers will be influenced by because of their of their "newness or freshness" and flock to find out more information about that certain product/service or fad. As a domainer, it is advantageous to be on the cusp of these brand new trends to create a domaining strategy that will be beneficial for people wanting to know more about them when they research them online. (think keywords, not cybersquatting)

Below are 13 websites that I personally use on a frequent basis to familiarize myself with current trends and forecasts that are creating a stir on the global marketplace. A little research can harbor great rewards for a domainer.

TREND HUNTER is the world's largest trend spotting and cool hunting community. It is an explosion of cool, fueled by a global network of trend spotters and cool hunters. Innovation and strategic advantage hinge on the ability to anticipate the latest trends and identify the next big thing. By tracking the evolution of cool, Trend Hunters generate ideas, stimulate creativity, and ultimately unlock cool.

Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business advice and other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take a great idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with “good” ideas over companies with experience and a business model.

Engadget is a multilingual technology weblog and podcast about consumer electronics. The weblog has won several awards. Engadget currently has four different sites, all operating simultaneously with each having its own staff, which cover technology news in different parts of the world in their respective languages.

The Guy Kawasaki Blog, a practical blog for impractical people, covers the world of innovation and marketing from the viewpoint of a successful and popular quirky business perspective.

AdRants is an editorial that covers emerging marketing and advertising trends, cultural and demographic shifts affecting advertising strategies, new campaign launches, viral and buzz marketing, useful industry research and the examination of the industry's shift from old paradigms to new.

ValleyWag is a tabloid-style news and gossip website about Silicon Valley and it's technology. It is kind of tongue-in-cheek but offers good insight to the current status of the high-tech hotbed.

Cool Hunting is a daily update on ideas and products in the intersection of art, design, culture and technology, and features weekly videos that get an inside look at the people who create them.

Killer Startups reviews 30+ internet startups per working day and allows member voting for the one you think will be a killer.

The Business Week Innovation Page lets visitors read the latest design news on product design, game design, branding, and architecture. Get information on business process innovation.

Google Hot Trends is for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time. What's on our collective mind as we search for information? What's interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a glance, you'll see the huge variety of topics capturing our attention, from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. Hot Trends is updated throughout the day, so check back often.

Springwise and its network of 8,000 spotters scan the globe for smart new business ideas, delivering instant inspiration to entrepreneurial minds from San Francisco to Singapore.

Cscout Japan is the most innovative and trendsetting country in the world with a great and still undeveloped potential for European companies. Japan’s Automotive Industry is the No.1 worldwide. Japan is the leading innovator of electronic appliances and gadgets. Japan is the birth place of the gaming market and boasts with the most advanced Mobile Communication Industry. It is well-known for its Media, Manga/Anime, successful TV shows and series etc.

T3 magazine online - the hottest gadget news and technology reviews from cameras to mobiles, TVs to MP3 players.

Japanese Ads Downplay URLs, Encourage Searches

There seems to be a new advertising trend emerging in Japan that domainers need to be aware of. Marketing companies of some major corporations are beginning to encourage potential customers to "search" for their company name and products instead of directing them to type in a specific URL website name. Is SEO ultimately going to trump direct web navigation?

A recent post at Boing Boing highlights how a recent visitor to Japan noticed obvious advertising using recommended search terms instead of the traditional direct URL promotions. AOL has been using this method with their highly-publicized "Search Keyword: ABC" campaign.

I have a few personal thoughts on this. At first glance, I seemed to understand that with the lack of "good" domain names available for companies, relying on keyword SEO was not only probably smart, but pretty much inevitable as a marketing campaign to compete with those generic domain names. But after some consideration, I started to realize that if a company decides to spend tons of money to advertise a specific search term as their primary method of attracting website visitors, the always changing search engine algorithms and blackhat SEO methods could possible skew the search results, letting other sites relevant to the advertised search term to pop up first and benefit from the intended traffic. The company would basically be advertising for another company. Bad business indeed.

Keep your eyes open on how this could effect longer keyword phrase domain registrations and such.

Domain Backwording: The Journey Continues

Since my first post on a new emerging domain trend called Backwording, I have, with help from other intrigued domainers, uncovered a little more interesting information, facts and tidbits about this topic. The last 5 days have been very exciting. Here's what we've found:

Things we've found out since the last post:

-- In early 2001, an Israeli firm named LocallyNet, made obscure headlines with it's idea of using a text-conversion algorithm in Internet browsers to allow typed-in entries to be read backwards by the browser. Seems the main motivator was that the CEO of LocallyNet saw the rapidly dwindling supply of domain names available as limitations to a growing Internet. This seems to be the origin of today's current backwording framework.

- As of today, there has not been one WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) domain name dispute case filed citing legal action against a backwards/reversed domain at fault or infringing on any UDRP policies.

- Major domain parking companies seem to often view backworded domains as regular domains and aggregate keyword advertising content as if the domain was not reversed. Examples are sthgilF.com (flights.com) and noisiveleT.com (television.com). [VERY INTERESTING]

- A huge marketplace for premium and generic backworded domains still exist, although each day a few more of our favorites are registered. Maybe people are starting to see this an an alternative method for advertising their websites?

- Google registered elgooG.com on April 7, 2000 and that domain has an Alexa ranking of 572,726. Another fun site is here.

- As expected, we were unable to find any significant sale records of any backworded domains in the past. This is mainly due to backwording still being an undiscovered niche.

- No matter how many people agree or disagree that backwording may become a permanent practice in the future, people and businesses around the world are already using backworded domains, and have been for quite some time.

- We also discovered that there is not a comprehensive list of developed domains that utilize backwording, so a project has been started and will be launched at Backwording.com. This website will be a community for domainers interested in backwording and a way for us to communicate more about the topic. Feel free to send me any backworded domains you have recently registered and developed so we can add them to our developed website directory (info@logistiklabs.com). More news will come soon. Stay posted by subscribing here.

So, as you can see, backwording is causing a small but definable ripple in the domain pool and causing other domainers to take notice. I'd like to thank everyone for their emails, comments and opinions on this emerging topic so far and look forward to uncovering more information about this interesting and hidden domain niche. The excitement is growing. Stay tuned.

-Rudy