.BLOG released

Automattic, the creators of WordPress, are behind the Knock Knock Whois There registry, who won the rights to distribute and maintain the new .blog TLD. November 23rd 2016 was the general availability release of .blog

If you didn’t know, WordPress is the most widely used content management system on the Internet, responsible for millions of blogs, websites, landing pages and more.

It makes perfect sense for them to run the .blog domain sphere, though their approach to the TLD has been controversial.

They’ve reserved most of the best keywords for themselves. Automattic also allowed each of their staff to reserve one .blog domain for each of themselves.

With the November 21st date circled in our calendar, I was much looking forward to seeing what .blog domains I could acquire.

The five I registered and paid for were:

digitalmarketing.blog

3dprint.blog

worldcup.blog

brainstorm.blog

digitalnomad.blog

I was thrilled the first three were available!

I waited all evening and night to receive a confirmation that the registrations went through, but woke up this morning to find cancellations and refunds for the first two – digitalmarketing.blog and 3dprint.blog (too good to be true).

[Note – We later registered thedigitalmarketing.blog]

I did win the other three, and worldcup.blog is particularly valuable: e.g. subdomains could be set up for rugby.worldcup.blog, russia.worldcup.blog, qatar.worldcup.blog, cricket.worldcup.blog – The possibilities are endless.

Note that I did also receive the legal trademark notification, that FIFA own the global trademark to “World Cup” and that I pretty much can’t sell anything related to it that bears the World Cup name. Little do they know the paradigm thinkers that we are.

At some point, Automattic may realise their slow .blog sales are due to their overbearing approach to holding on to the best keywords, but, as we’ve learned with hundreds of existing new gTLDs, those who wait too long may miss the boat on domain success.

We’ll keep brainstorming .blog domain names, and very soon on Mother.Domains we will be offering the full .blog package – .blog domain name with WordPress set up automatically, and secure WordPress hosting included, on our green-powered server.

Do you have a .blog domain name? Let us know.