Frank Michlick, of Domain Name News fame, is speaking at HostingCon tomorrow (Monday) at Navy Pier (picture) in Chicago, so I drove up here to heckle him. It’s also my understanding that there are people here from Demand Media, Dark Blue Sea, Tucows, Dotster, Oversee.net, Sedo, DNZoom and other domain companies. It seems like the invasion of the domainer contingency at this years HostingCon. Come on out to here Frank and the other domain company representatives including Jothan Frakes, Tim Schumacher and Sean Stafford speak on Monday morning and then Richard Rosenblatt will be keynoting later Monday evening. Adam Eisner is also making a presentation on Wednesday about Domain Search. A few of the domain companies are also in exhibit booths including Dark Blue Sea who appear to be looking to pick up more venues to sell domains from the Domain Distribution Network.

If you are in Chicago and want to have a drink buy us drinks, let us know via email : editor at domainnamenews.com.

Hopefully, I’ll have some more stuff for you from tomorrows events.

Oversee.net, parent company of DomainSponsor has launched a new parking service targeting Hosting, registrar, registry, and Internet Service Provider companies. [Press Release]

Richard Rosenblatt, CEO of Demand Media will be keynoting the upcoming HostingCon, July 23rd in Chicago, IL. Demand Media is parent company behind at least 3 domain related ventures, enom.com, Hot Keys and the .TV project. Rosenblatt will be speaking about “What Lies Ahead for Hosting”.

If you are in the area it might not be a bad event to attend. The price is fairly inexpensive at around $400 for full conference pass. Compared to domain related shows this is a super bargain. Rosenblatt seems like a much more appropriate keynote as well. The topics covered in the rest of the show might be outside of the realm of what a domainer wants to know about. However, I’ve been to HostingCon before and found it to be a good place to learn about and guage the web service industry.

DomainSponsor, Sedo and Tucows are already on the exhibitor list and I know the guys from enom.com are planning on attending. The last HostingCon I went to in 2005 had no parking/ppc companies and only 1 domain company that I can recall meeting at the exhibtor booths, so this maybe a sign of the times as the hosting and ISP companies start making more strategic partnerships with parking providers and domain registrar companies.

Refer to Frank’s DNCalendar.com for more a calendar of internet/domain industry events.

Verizon has recently introduced “Advanced Web Search“, a “service” that reminds of Verisign’s Sitefinder. When you mistype a URL in your browser, they will show you some search results and ads instead of the usual error. While back in the day ICANN was able to shut down the Verisign service for the COM/NET TLDs, they have little to no power to decide what ISPs do within their network.

Interestingly enough this type of “service” often means the involved companies are making money of typos, which is hardly any different from companies registering and monetizing domains that are typos of other domains. And then there also is the Browser Default search that often tries to “help” by converting typos in the address bar of the browser into search queries for MSN live or Google.

[via Arstechnica]