Squishycow photos continue to pile up on Flickr. This week we’re featuring the work of Kayla Fleming who posted a couple of really nice shots of our friend around the offices at the hosting company where she works. I’ll admit to being somewhat jealous - Orlando looks nice and warm, while here in Toronto we’re already fighting through snow and ice.

We’ll be showcasing more squishycow photos over the coming weeks. If you’d like to see your shots on our blog, add your photos to Flickr with the tag squishycow and then add the photo to the group, Squishycows in the wild. We’ll post a new photo every week or so and link to your photostream.

What: Domains Search and Sell web seminar
When: Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 1:00 p.m. ET

Tucows resellers are invited to join Adam Eisner, Product Manager, Domains as he explains how you can increase your domain name sales by rethinking the domain search process. Adam will demonstrate how using tools like name suggestion and Premium Domains offer better, more relevant search results that lead to more domain name sales. Adam will also discuss Tucows’ Parked Pages and Expired Domains programs - two easy ways for you to make money without lifting a finger.

This 30-minute web seminar, exclusive to Tucows resellers, will take you on an interactive, guided tour of the innovative tools you should be using to provide your customers with the best possible domain purchasing experience.

Click here to register.

The Washington Post ran a story Wednesday by Paul Farhi titled, “How Do You Tell a Web Name From a Typo,” in which Tucows is mentioned amongst some other Internet companies with odd names. Certainly the Tucows name is unique, but it’s more than just a misspelling (Joost), or an English word with select vowels stripped out (Flickr), or a non-english word that translates into what the company is all about (Mahalo).

The Tucows name can be traced back all the way to the early days of the commercial Internet. Back in 1993, Scott Swedorski started Tucows in Flint, Michigan, as a website where users could download Windows 3.1 software that allowed the operating system to access the Internet. Tucows was an acronym for The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software - T.U.C.O.W.S. It seemed only natural to incorporate cows into the logo back then and we continue that tradition to this day.

Over the 14 years since Tucows was founded, the business has expanded to provide service providers (like ISPs and hosting companies)  everything from wholesale Internet services like domain names and hosted email, to SSL digital certificates and a software billing solution for ISP’s and Hosting companies called Platypus (a unique name in itself). The Tucows download site lives on to this day providing a place where Internet users can find and download the latest and greatest in freeware and shareware software.

In his article, Farhi calls out Yahoo! and Google (among others) as separate from the goofy name trend:

“Google and Yahoo are creative names — short (hence, easy to type into a browser), quirky and suggestive. Google: something very large, almost infinite, like a googolplex. Yahoo: a simple person, or an expression of joy. Ditto the sounds of Facebook and YouTube, which conjure something personal without getting silly about it.”

I’d like to suggest that with an Internet heritage that is even richer than those two companies (Yahoo! wasn’t founded until 1994, Google came much later in 1998), that Tucows should be regarded as a trend setter. And to suggest that the Tucows name is nothing more than a silly play on words diminishes that rich heritage that can be traced back to the very beginnings of the World Wide Web as we’ve come to know and enjoy it.

So to Paul Farhi, thanks again for the mention and we’d be more than happy to send you a couple of Tucows squishycows. Drop us a line on the blog, or via email (jkoole at tucows.com).

Photo by Sarah McGee. For more of Sarah’s photos visit her Flickr photostream. Thanks, Sarah!

With a company name like Tucows, you really can’t escape cows – from black and white cowskin lettering on our software download site back in the early days, to giving away a live cow at a trade show (seriously, it happened), to squishycows, we’ve certainly embraced our bovine heritage.

The humble squishycow has become quite popular of late. We give out hundreds and hundreds of them, complete with a little tag asking that the new owner take some photos and post them on the photo sharing website Flickr with the tag “squishycow“. Last time we checked, there were over 500 photos of our squishy friend.

Squishycow drinks coffee and had a run-in with a sheep. She’s gone swimming, taken a flight, seen a NASCAR race and gone to the beach. She’s visited Paris, London and Niagara Falls. Squishycow has learned to program and got an iPhone.

Thanks to all who take the time to make some really beautiful images featuring the squishycow. We’re going to start featuring some of the best of the pictures on the blog over the next little while. To have your photo considered, simply add it to our Flickr group “Squishycows in the wild“

I’m Craig Cluett, the Director of the Business Development team at Tucows. I’ve been with the company for three months and am proud of the energy and enthusiasm we show for our resellers and services.

On Saturday, I was part of a team from Tucows that went to to London as sponsors of the LINX59 Meeting. As one of the world’s largest and longest established Internet exchanges, LINX is a who’s who of London’s ISPs, network providers and operators. We really appreciated the warm welcome we received from the LINX group and their members.

LINX’s John Souter (CEO) and Grahame Davies (Chairman) have a lot to be proud of. The forums they offer their members are top-shelf, extremely well run and thoroughly organized. Hats off to Jeremy Orbell, Neana Singh, Jennifer Atherton, and the rest of the good folks of LINX.

The topics covered during the two day event were chosen by the members and were for the members. The end result was good discussion and greater understanding between everyone. Our very own Kim Phelan started off the two days of discussion with a brief overview of Tucows and how we go to market with our 8,500+ partners (1,000 of which are in the UK) in our key offerings of wholesale domain names and hosted email.

Adam Eisner, while not subbing in as Kim’s personal photographer (at the request of the communication team back home in the “colonies”), was kept busy chatting with the 100 plus members in attendance.

Part of the magic of the LINX forum is the special attention put into the significant networking opportunities across a number of venues (a.k.a. pubs) where the discussions get lively and great strides towards shared understanding are made. All in all, it was a productive couple of days for everyone and Tucows will be looking into becoming a member of one of the world’s largest and longest established Internet exchanges.

Cheers to all our new friends at LINX!

Update: As promised, a few pictures from the LINX meeting.

Update Wednesday, November 21, 2007 09:54a.m. ET: Parked Pages has been online since the early morning. We are happy to report that all services are online. Thank you for your patience.

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Update at 4:50 p.m. ET:The operations team report that Parked Pages is now intermittently unavailable; they continue to investigate this. We can, however, advise that all other services remain fully online. We’ll keep you updated via System Status regarding Parked Pages.

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Update at 1:50 p.m. ET: Our Operations team has got the traffic hitting our load balancers under control. We’re back online and service has been restored to OpenSRS Domain Provisioning and Management, OpenHRS, CGPRO OpenSRS Email, Blogware, Website Builder, Digital Certificates, Managed DNS Service and WHOIS. Parked Pages remains offline. We’re continuing to monitor our services, analyze and block traffic as required. We’ll keep you updated via System Status and here on the blog.

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UPDATE at 12:57 p.m. ET: Our network operations team has established that our load balancers are experiencing significantly higher than normal traffic levels. Working with our data colocation vendor, the team is currently searching for the source of this traffic. We have put some blocks in place and are continuing to analyze and monitor this traffic so that we can get our services back online.

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Unfortunately, a number of our services are offline including: OpenSRS Domain Provisioning and Management, OpenHRS, CGPRO OpenSRS Email, Blogware, Website Builder, Digital Certificates, Managed DNS Service, Parked Pages, and WHOIS.

Services not affected are the Email Defense Service, the new Tucows Email Service and our ticketing system.

Domain names continue to resolve and all email messages are being queued. No mail will be lost - we’ll deliver it as soon as we resolve this issue.

While we are experiencing higher than normal call volumes, our Support teams are available to take your calls and emails. The ticket number for this issue is 10794.

As our Operations team works to resolve this issue, we’ll keep our System Status page updated, and also keep you posted with updates here on our blog.

We apologize for any inconvenience this outage is causing to you and your customers.

Tucows headquarters is in Toronto, Canada. So, while our American friends to the south are digging into Thanksgiving feasts, watching giant balloons make their way through New York City, enjoying football and officially kicking off the Christmas shopping season, we’ll be open for business as usual.

Tucows Reseller support, Platypus support, Payments, Sales and Compliance will all be operating on regular hours on Thursday and Friday.

Have a safe and enjoyable holiday!

p.s. thanks to Flickr user ♥ellie♥ for the photo and for releasing it under a Creative Commons License.

It’s been a busy year for our domain name business. We’ve introduced our Premium Domains service, dropped our prices, built a more transparent billing structure and made many of our domain name features – including DNS and WHOIS Privacy – completely free.

Today, we’re adding another big announcement to the pile: we’re going to share over $1 million in revenues with resellers over the next 12 months. We’ll be doing this through our Parked Pages and Expired Domains programs, both of which are designed to help our resellers make more money from unused and expiring domain names.

Under the terms of both these programs, we split all net advertising revenue 50-50 with our resellers. And if, at a later date, we sell one of these names through our Premium Domains service, we’ll share 10% of net revenue with the original reseller as well.

So why did we decide to do this? After all, we could have simply kept the money; in fact, many registrars do. Our philosophy, though, is a little different – we think customers should be rewarded for choosing to sell and register names with Tucows. One million dollars, we think, is one very nice way to say “thank you.”

You can read our full announcement here.

Bill Sweetman, Tucows General Manager, Domain Portfolio is out in Vancouver this week for a marketing conference known as “DM Day.” The DM stands for direct marketing, and the conference is presented by the British Columbia Association of Internet Marketers. Bill was asked to talk domains and gave a well-received presentation titled, “Domain Name Karate: The ‘ancient’ art of maximizing and defending your domain names.”

Warren Frey of Techvibes was there and gives a nice summary of Bill’s talk on the Techvibes blog. You can read about it here.

And while I’m on the topic of Bill and domain names, our man Sweetman was down at Traffic in Miami a few weeks back and talked to a few of the movers and shakers in the domain industry. You can listen to those interviews by way of his podcast series, “Marketing Martini.” Not surprisingly, those can be found at http://www.marketingmartini.com/. So far Bill’s posted chats with Monte Cahn, founder and CEO of Moniker, Phil Corwin, legal counsel to the Internet Commerce Association and Peter Lamson of NameMedia.

You can listen right on the website, or subscribe to Bill’s podcast series in iTunes via this link.

Most people would jump on the opportunity to spend 10 days in Los Angeles. Sun, surf and stars - it doesn’t get any better.

Of course, most people aren’t involved in ICANN. 10 days with no sunlight and all of our surfing was done on the web.

A typical ICANN meeting starts out with the pre-meeting activity. This time, I flew down a couple of days ahead of the pre-meetings for some pre-pre-meetings to make sure that the pre-meetings went smoothly. Confused yet? Me too and I’ve been doing this for eight years.

The big item on the agenda this past week was the issue of Whois. The problem that we face is that ICANN’s requirement to publish personal contact information on the web via Whois contradicts privacy laws in many countries. We’ve been actively involved in trying to find a compromise between the anti-privacy crowd who wants to continue with Whois in its current form regardless of what the law says and the pro-privacy folks on the other hand that are looking for exemptions that would allow regular people to opt-out of having their data publicly accessible. Not all of their data, just their phone number and email addresses.

The anti-privacy folks (mostly the same people that brought you the RIAA and other over-zealous intellectual property organizations) don’t like this approach because they believe that this will make it easier for normal folks to infringe on their intellectual property rights. I won’t go into the details of their arguments, but suffice to say that there is very little in the way of “intellect” in their opposition.

I personally spent four days in various back-room meetings trying to negotiate a compromise that would work for everyone. At one point, I had an explicit agreement from the intellectual property representatives, but when the chips hit the table, they “forgot” that we had made a deal. Serves me right, I should have had them sign something. Never do a handshake deal with a lawyer from Hollywood.

I won’t go into all of the gory details around Whois, there are a bazillion press reports on the subject. Dvorak called me “stupid”, elsewhere I was referred to as “emotional” and that I was “overreacting”. Very few of the reports actually got the details of the story right - most of them were heavily influenced by the highly-organized lobby against our compromises. Never underestimate the capabilities of a ticked off intellectual property lawyer.

Nick Jesdanun and Burke Hansen wrote my two favorite stories, although what Burke thought was an attempt at a protest was actually an aborted attempt to sneak out to the washroom.

The next big issues on the ICANN policy agenda relate to domain tasting and “front-running”. There will also be some additional work in the area of domain transfers. We will continue to take a leadership role on these issues as we have on other ICANN issues in the past. It is an important organization that makes important decisions related to the future of the internet and we believe it is critical for us to make sure that we look out for the interests of our business and those of our resellers in this forum.

This meeting also marked the end of Vint Cerf’s term as Chairman of the Board. At a gala event at Sony Studios, everyone from Al Gore to Darth Vader participated in sending Vint off in style with the kind of words and more than just a touch of Hollywood flourish.

Vint will be replaced with Peter Dengate-Thrush, a long time ICANN participant with roots in the ccTLD community. Tucows completely supports Peter and we strongly believe that he will have a positive effect on ICANN and its future direction. It is definitely worth noting that Peter was one of the few ICANN directors that voted against allowing Verisign the unchecked capability to increase domain name registration prices.

The next ICANN meeting will be held in New Delhi this coming February. Tucows will of course be there - our 28th consecutive meeting. Whew!

(photo’s by AP and Joi Ito)