And here’s the week in Domains – here at DNN and elsewhere. I’m hoping to bring this back as a weekly post, wish me luck ;-)

Here at DNN:

• Left Of the Dot Launches Marketing Name Campaign (Nov 16)
• Domain Sales Report for Week 45, 2011 (Nov 16)
• SnapNames Year End Auction Ends Toda (Nov 17)

Elsewhere in the Domain Industry:

• Stop Parking Domains and Build a Real Business – With Adam Dicker (Nov 13, DomainSherpa.com)
• There are still Gentlemen in the Domain Industry (Nov 14, Acro.net)
• Citrix Assigns $18 Million Value to Cloud.com Domain Name (Nov 14, DNW.com)
• Why CRIDO Has No Cred (Nov 14, DNW.com)
• T.R.A.F.F.I.C. and a Return to Las Vegas (Nov 15, RicksBlog.com)
• After Passing On Flowers.Mobi, 1-800-Flowers Grabs Flowers.Me (Nov 15, TheDomains.com)
• Afternic Sales Report: Iron Workers Union Buys IronWorkers.com (Nov 15, ElliotsBlog.com)
• Using Escrow.com as a Negotiation Tactic (Nov 16, ElliotsBlog.com)
• Visa Launches V.Me (Nov 16, TheDomains.com)
• Visa Launches Beta Version of V.me Today “Reinventing the way you pay and get paid” (Nov 16, NameTalent.com)
• Rick Schwartz completes acquistion of MarioMonti.com (Nov 16, DomainGang.com)
• Gaddafi ousted from Libya’s Whois (Nov 16, DomainIncite.com)
• Staff changes at new gTLD consultancies (Nov 16, DomainIncite.com)
• “New TLD” Becomes an Expensive Keyword on Google (Nov 16, DNW.com)

Outside the Domain Industry:

• Did You Mean Backupify? Why You Should Buy Domain Name Variants (Nov 16, Backupify.com)

What do you think were the biggest news for the domain industry this week? Let us know in the comments.

The US government seized the domains for Poker Stars, Absolute Poker, and Full Tilt Poker and charged the site principals with bank fraud, illegal gambling offenses and laundering billions in illegal gambling proceeds.

See the full press release after the jump
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Sun.com to set and go dark on June 1st, 2011

According to iwhois, Sun.com is the 11th oldest domain name together with ibm.com, registered on March 1986. Oracle, who purchased Sun Microcomputers in 2009, is apparently now decommissioning the brand and sun.com domain according to a blog post on the OTN garage blog. The domain had been redirecting to a Oracle site for a while and the post states that most of the site content has already been migrated.

According to responses to the comments on the blog post blogs.sun.com will continue to function for now, so it appears that the domain is not going up for sale immediately. The current expiry date is 20-Mar-2012.  Other commentators also question what will happen to other subdomains, such as the java.sun.com which is embedded on many websites using Java applets.

[via Engadget, Sun OTN Blog]

After US authorities seized domain names twice earlier this year, a Dutch Anti-Piracy group  (BREIN) has now been able to follow suit and shut down 29 additional sites by working with the MPAA and the sites’ hosting providers; in this case the domain names itself were apparently not seized. The last set of seized domain names by US Immigration and Customs were taken over by ordering the registry operator, Verisign to change the nameserves and lock the seized domain names at the registry level.

As TechDirt reports, BREIN has apparently shut down 29 sites, but has refused to provide a list of the sites according to TorrentFreak, so it is not known if the sites were actually directly offering downloads or merely acted as pointers to peer 2 peer downloads. The sites were shut down without informing the owners and at least one of them (hd-united.com) was temporarily redirected to BREIN’s website. Considering the shut-down happened at the hosting level, the owners of the domain names will be able to repoint them to another hosting company. Currently hd-united.com is no longer resolving.

[via TechDirt]

While we normally do not publish news releases about domain names that are listed for sale, we thought this one was worth a note:

Ebook Solution Provider DNAML is accepting bids for the domain name eBook.com, which they are considering to sell as “part of management’s recent decision to streamline DNAML’s focus on its core eBook technology platform and distribution/aggregation business“. Apparently the offer just includes the domain name and not the current ebook sale website hosted on the domain.

According to the press release:

eBook.com is the #1 organic search result for the keyword “ebook” across Google, Yahoo, Bing and all other major search engines. The site has produced over 4.7 million eBook downloads over the past year alone, with only 12,000 titles in inventory.

Initial bids are due to Viant Capital by 2:00 pm PDT on September 30, 2010 with closing expected to occur before the end of October. Interested parties can contact Viant Capital on dnaml(at)viantgroup(dot)com.

[via Press Release]

I found an interesting  product today while searching for some domain news articles.  It’s Domain, the men’s fragrance by Mary Kay.

Mary Kay describes the fragrance :  “Wrap him in the scent of hearth and home with Domain® Cologne Spray. He’s a breath of fresh air and so is this blend of lavender and oak moss.”

Nothing says “Domain” like lavender and oak moss, eh?

Maybe we can offer a rewrite and remix with DNN’s version : “Wrap him in the scent of the sea breeze of a beach side bungalow and the musky air of a grotto with Domain Cologne Spray. He’s a breath of fresh .com registrations and so is this blend of whiskey and Cuban cigar aromas.”

Could this be the perfect gift for your domainer husband/boyfriend ? Unfortunately, Domain cologne is not available at the domain Cologne.com    : )

Until ICANN releases One Letter TLDs (no plans have been announced so far), .TO has now introduced the world’s shortest URL shortener in partnership with eCorporation.com. Unfortunately the new service comes with some problems:

When you try to access the service from your webbrowser, you can however not just enter “to” in your browser’s address bar, as that will trigger a search in most of today’s browsers. So you will have to enter “www.to” instead. So the site will also append the “www.” in front of the shortened URL and thus actually negate their advantage of having the shortest URL – however without doing so, the generated addresses would most likely not pass the validation for a valid link used on most sites. The only alternative option is to write the addresses like this “http://to./d6Goe“, which most webbrowsers will then again correctly identify as a domain.

[via YCombinator News]

As announced via email today, Francois Carrillo, operator of Domaining.com and Premiumdomains.com, has launched a public Beta of Valuate.com, a free automated Domain Evaluation tool. Shortly after he sent out the launch email however, it seems that the site was temporarily not responding, possibly due to a high load.

The estimated value of the domain name is based on recent sales and according to the site.

Sedo is launching “Sedo MLS” today, a domain listing, sales and transfer fulfilment platform similar to Fabulous.com‘s Domain Distribution Network. In the initial launch phase the product is mostly aimed at partnering with registrars in order to facilitate sale and instant transfer of domain names. According to inside sources Sedo already has several partners lined up that will implement and offer the service shortly.

More information can be found on the new Sedo MLS site and in a forthcoming press release.

DomainNameNews set out to collect information on domain newsletters out there. The following eight newsletters offer you domains for sale, but also domains available for (re-)registration. Find out about the 8 Domain Newsletters you cannot afford to miss after the jump. (more…)