According to whois, Nordu.Net was registered on Jan 1, 1985. Don’t believe it? Well…as a nice little Christmas present, I’ve included a PDF version of a hardcover book titled The History of Nordu.Net. Consider it bedtime reading for Internet / networking geeks.

I’d also note another interesting bit of information. RFC 921 states on 15 Jan 85 under “Begin New Domain Registration” -”New domains may register according to the procedures and restrictions described in RFC-920 [5].” Perhaps they didn’t ask the Europeans?

This is how the list should look – the top 5 currently registered, oldest domain names are:

1. Nordu.Net – Jan 1, 1985

2. Symbolics.com – March 15, 1985

3. BBN.com – April 24, 1985

4. Think.com – May 24, 1985

5. MCC.com – July 11, 1985

If you know of any older domain names please let me know and I will update the list.

While the kids have been crying about their parking revenue, I’ve been buying BIG time and making a profit. Some of you who know me will know that I’ve only ever sold a handful of few domain names. Why? Because

a) I don’t buy rubbish

b) In the past people have made me offers that I just couldn’t refuse

c) I have made mistakes! Who would believe it eh?

Here is an example of one such mistake. A couple of months ago I purchased a domain with traffic in a gambling related niche. I thought it would make money and couldn’t get it working with traditional parking. It would have been a good name to develop, but I just don’t have the time and I wasn’t 100% convinced that my efforts would be rewarded. As such, I left the domain parked and wasn’t going to do anything with it. A couple of weeks after I purchased the domain I received an offer of just on 400% more than what I paid for it. I thought about it for 24 hours (you have to sleep on these things) and sold it.

There is a well known saying “When everyone zigs, you should zag” and that’s just what I’ve been doing. But you shouldn’t, because then there wouldn’t be any opportunities for me. Go and join the herd. Baaaaa.

Here are a few points from the Exec summary:

• In mid 2008 there were 168 million domain name registrations.
• 4% growth over Q1 2008 and a 22% growth over the same quarter last year.
• In terms of total registrations its .com followed by .de, .cn and .net.
• .uk and .org had about the same number of registrations (give or take 35k)

Many people thought that Alexa ratings were flawed because their data was based on information from a toolbar and only a small portion of internet users had it installed. So what does “more source” actually mean? Well Alexa don’t provide any details except for saying “We now aggregate data from multiple sources”. My guess is that its probably clickstream data from various ISP’s.

Alexa are not making the old ranking numbers available and are slowly converting the historical traffic data, so right now only 9 months is available.