A company called USpeakWeType Technologies purchased dnhour.com from Koay Al Vin for $3,200 at the SEDO auction which concluded two weeks ago. USpeak also owns overflowlegal.com, another Digg-Style site for law. The domain name itself - dnhour -was not worth much, but the web site boasted solid traffic, Page Rank 4 and over 2,000 registered users. The site stacks up well against domaining.com, dnjournal.com and conceptualist.com. We have the inside story below ...
Yes, it is true. We are breaking the news here first. Enrico Scheafer - a domain and trademark attorney with the, law firm Traverse Legal, technology entrepreneur and part-time domainer - made the winning bid at SEDO auction for www.dnhour.com on behalf of a technology and web development company which he and his partners own, USpeakWeTypeTechnologies, LLC. The transfer of the domain and web site is almost complete. An interview of Enrico about the purchase is found below...
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to VTalk Radio Tech Spotlight. This program is sponsored by Overflowlegal.com. Overflowlegal.com, the definitive portal of legal information on the internet. And now here's your host, Damien Allen.
DAMIEN: Good afternoon and welcome to VTalk Radio Tech Spotlight. I am Damien Allen in the studio, and on the phone we have Enrico Schaefer, owner and proprietor of U Speak We Type Technologies. He is also an attorney with Traverse Legal. Good afternoon and welcome to the program, Enrico.
ENRICO: Thanks, Damien, glad to be here.
DAMIEN: The domainer community was abuzz the last couple of weeks because dnhour.com became available for sale through a SEDO auction. Why all the hype?
ENRICO: Yeah, Damien, we picked the domain up at an auction at SEDO recently, and you know, the domainer community was all abuzz when DNHour went up for auction a couple of weeks ago, and became available for sale though the SEDO auction. All the hype I think got us interested, and we saw what was going on out there, and decided to jump in on the deal.
DAMIEN: So why did you jump in to grab it?
ENRICO: Well, for one, Quy Al Vin was really one of the first people out there to accumulate the best content on the web concerning domain issues. He jumped in and started this site back in about June 2007, I believe, and he was one of the first, and we love pioneers. There are some other good sites out there such as domaining.com which now accumulates domainer level content, but Quy was first. There's some other publications like DN Journal, Domain Name News, Domainnews.com and Domain Name Wire, and they do a good job about reporting some of the things going on in the domain markets and the domain community, but we really respected the fact that Quy had invented this new niche for the pligg, i.e., Digg - for the pligg site technology. Second, you know, the community he has built at DNHour boasts 2500 members. So we saw what he had built there in terms of community of people, and we just didn't think that that should be left to drift off. Third it's a domain with limited value. www.dnhour.com, but solid page rank, solid traffic, and solid content. So we knew that the site had value, and we wanted to see the site continue on. So we jumped in on it, and we were fortunate enough to pick it up for $3200.
DAMIEN: So now that you're the owner of www.dnhour.com, what's next?
ENRICO: Well, you know, we really think that this has some good potential. I have to say that we were early members of the DNHour community and we certainly didn't want to see it die and so we want to continue to build it. We want the DNHour community first to know that we are going to preserve what has been accomplished to date and really grow it and extend it as a domainer tool, as an information tool for domainers. We already run other pligg sites such as www.overflowlegal.com so we have people who can simply step into this project and devote the necessary resources to help realize the full potential of DNHour. We have some really exciting ideas on how to drive A+ content within the domainer niche. We're also going to be inviting new members to go ahead and join the community and that will allow them to participate and help lead the discussion about the future of domaining. The market is a little bit down right...a little bit flat...according to many. But there's only one top level domain attached to .com for each word, there's only one, and we understand that the domain market is going to continue to expand and grow, and we want to be a part of that. Of course, we will be soliciting everyone's information and ideas about what they think the www.dnhour.com domain should be doing in the future, and we'll be getting that feedback in over the course of the next couple of months, we'll lay forth a strategic plan for continuing to grow that site. We're just happy to be part of it.
DAMIEN: Anything else you'd like to add before we finish up today?
ENRICO: Well, I just want to again reaffirm to the current community members that we're not going anywhere so they should continue to post their content and continue to participate in rating that content and commenting on the posts that show up there and help us realize the potential here for this particular forum. DNHour is still the only pligg site for domainers in the market. The other information sources out there don't do and can't do what DNHour can do as a pligg site, and Damien, just so you know the key to a pligg site is anyone can put any content about domaining into the system. So unlike a news journal which primarily relies on its own authors to generate content, DNHour can pull content from anywhere and once it's pulled into the system, people can comment on it and people can rate it. If I want to see all the best information on the internet about escrow issues and domaining, we'll create a category for that, the end users will rate the content, and I can now see the rated content for escrow issues and domainers through the DNHour website, and that's really the goal. We're going to be creating a lot more categories and a lot more sub categories so that it becomes an encyclopedia of rated information about domain issues.
DAMIEN: So in essence you're creating the professional Wikopedia of domaining issues?
ENRICO: Exactly.
DAMIEN: In deed. Well, we thank you very much for joining us today and sharing all this wonderful information with us, Enrico.
ENRICO: No problem, Damien, my pleasure.
ANNOUNCER: You have been listening to the VTalk Radio Tech Spotlight and we've been speaking about www.DNHour.com and its new owners You Speak We Type Technologies. We've been on the phone with Enrico Schaefer who is also the owner of Traverse Legal, and you've been listening to the VTalk Radio Tech Spotlight. We'll catch you next time.
Thanks Dave. We have some exciting plans for dnhour.com. Hope all is well with you.
Posted by: Enrico Schaefer | 10/01/2008 at 08:54
Congrats on the purchase, Enrico. :)
Posted by: David | 10/01/2008 at 01:52