Job.ca is getting auctioned through MyID

Yesterday, MyID has announced that they’ll be auctionning a huge domain name —job.ca— on June 24-25th 2009.

This is very big news since job.ca stands to be the biggest domain name ever auctioned in Canada.

And whoever gets it will likely keep it forever so if someone needs that incredible name, now is probably the last chance in their lifetime they are given to bid for and win it.

Billions upon billions of dollars are being spent and made every year, regarding employment, in Canada.

Using the job.ca domain name provides an unbelievable strategic advantage for whoever uses it over all those who don’t have such an outstanding name.

And the “job.ca” suffix is just the beginning because the current owner had already registered the provincial suffixes such as…

• job.bc.ca
• job.ab.ca
• job.sk.ca
• job.mb.ca
• job.on.ca
• job.qc.ca
• job.nb.ca
• job.ns.ca

…and they’re all going to be awarded to the winning bidder. The other provincial suffixes can also be registered by the winning bidder, when in control of the “job.ca” domain name.

By all means, this event is likely going to make history for two reasons:

• the biggest domain name ever auctioned in Canada; and
• the expected largest bid ever made for a Canadian domain name.

If a company deals in the Canadian job market and doesn’t bid on this name, the C-level managers need to fire their marketing manager. Job.ca is way too big an opportunity to miss.

Lots of interested parties will want to get their hands on the job.ca domain name, such as:

• Job boards, domestic and foreign
  • The job.ca name is enough to completely reshape the job posting and resume acquisition landscape, in Canada.
  • No job board can pass this opportunity up because the consequences of having a competitor get such a huge name could prove financially suicidal.
  • Just imagine, for one moment, that “company A” gets job.ca and markets it, all over the country. How are all the other job boards supposed to counter that? That’s why every job board will likely bid way up to make sure they secure what will become the biggest “job-related” web address, in Canada.
• Employment agencies
  • For any serious canadian employment agency, winning the job.ca auction would mean almost instant gains, in terms of lucrative new customers.
• Universities, colleges
  • All educational institutions, in Canada, have placement services which, in many ways, are a vital cornerstone of their ongoing success. If students get a job once they graduate, more people will buy their education programs. It’s that simple!
  • By getting their hands on job.ca, a placement service could benefit from untold publicity, prestige and instant credibility. Year after year. Basically forever. This is the hottest investment they can ever make.
  • And the job.ca domain name will likely go up in value, forever.
  • By all means, this is a blue chip domain name.
• Large employers
  • Canada counts some of the richest employers on Earth and as such, they’d love to grab the job.ca domain name for their own job-related promotion activities.
  • People instantly understand that a given employer is at the very top if it uses job.ca, the shortest and most powerful job domain name ever to be registered, in the country… even before the CIRA was created!

Among the bidders for job.ca, expect to find bankers who understand cornerstone domain names are a new form of highly valuable currency that goes up in value all the time. It’s highly portable and generates revenue on its own.

Domain name speculators might also feel the urge to chip in because if they win the job.ca domain name, they might be able to auction it off for much more, the next day. Potential buyers who missed the name the first time (and again, it would be unwise to ignore this historic auction) will basically go all out the second time around to get it so if a speculator gets the name, there’s a good chance a new record will be set shortly after the anticipated record bid, on the first auction at MyID, June 24-25, 2009.

These are exciting times, indeed.

While people realize the economy may have slowed down a bit, it changes nothing to the fundamentals. Employers want to find talented people and workers are looking for jobs. And both meet at job.ca. Naturally. It’s intuitive.

If you’re looking to buy up one super-valuable domain name this year, job.ca is most likely it.

Nothing spells unlimited profits like the job market which generates untold billions of dollars, per year, in Canada alone. Job.ca is a golden bridge, or so to speak, to one of the most, if not the most, lucrative market, ever.

There’s no question people all over the world, and especially Canada, know the true value of the job.ca domain name. It’ll be very exciting to see who gets the name and consequently, crushes the competition by using the most intuitive, memorable, credible and timeless Canadian job-related name ever to have been registered.

Tags: job.ca, job, job-related, canada, canadian, domain, name, domain name, domains, domainers, domaining, domain investment, domain blue chip, myid, myid.ca, myid auction, myid domain name auction, the biggest name ever auctioned in canada, canada’s biggest domain name, biggest auction ever, canadian namespace, cira, job.bc.ca, job.ab.ca, job.sk.ca, job.mb.ca, job.on.ca, job.qc.ca, job.nb.ca, job.ns.ca, job market, canada’s job domain name, auction in june, 2009

No way to delete messages in LinkedIn

From day one of when internet messaging services were made available, whatever we received could easily be deleted.

Wether it’s because we read the messages or didn’t need them anymore, it’s always been “standard” to be able to DELETE (and permanently DESTROY) them.

And it just makes sense. Plain, common sense.

It’s the most fundamental of functions — like when snail mail (or “regular mail”, whichever you prefer) isn’t useful for us anymore, we can throw it out. It’s just how things are done. But NOT at LinkedIn. Oh! No, these folks have developed some kind of unexplainable “allergy against deletion”.

Case in point, all inbox messages, in your LinkedIn account, wether they’re…

• Received;
• Sent; or
• Archived.

…can NEVER be deleted!

Isn’t that just completely wicked?

For instance, if ten other members send you “invitations” every week, you’ll likely have hundreds of theses “declined invitations” floating around your inbox after just a few months. It’s unacceptable.

LinkedIn blog’s authors, such as “christman” seems to be purposefully ignoring the repetitive requests to implement a delete button, in the inbox.

So, LinkedIn is forcing its members to deal with a littered inbox system which is supremely counterproductive — why would LinkedIn, which is a network of “professionals”, allow for such a thing to happen? Well, that’s a question nobody seems to be able to answer and LinkedIn, itself, provides no explanation on this.

Advertising isn’t shown in the inbox area so it can’t possibly be that the LinkedIn admins want members to sift through old messages in the hope that such activity will generate a handful of clicks. No, it has to be something else.

Could it be sheer “coder laziness”? Like when web site coders decide it’s too much of a hassle to implement a “delete button” for any inbox message? That makes no sense either because the implementation of such a feature is very easy. So it’s something else… but what?

LinkedIn looks like it’s trying to pull wool over their members’ eyes with lofty comments about privacy like when Steve Ganz says “[...] we’ve always believed that users should own and control their data [...]” but what they fail to say (or “prefer not to say”) is that they too have access to all of our data.

But, that’s not all…

Ganz also states, for LinkedIn, that “[...] we firmly believe in users’ rights to privacy [...]” but that doesn’t say, in any way, that they’ll respect those rights! For a company that wants to “be clear” about everything, they’re “playing with words” all the time.

Just to prove that last point, Ganz adds “[...] we promise to continue to keep privacy firmly in focus [...]” but again, “keeping something in focus” doesn’t mean they’ll safeguard our rights, even from themselves.

Perhaps LinkedIn thinks its members are gullible and unintelligent but their doublespeak is exposing a somewhat intriguing agenda of theirs where they carefully (and apparently, purposefully) prevent their users from deleting their messages. Even MySpace allows that!

And perhaps that’s where the real answer to the “no delete button, in the inbox” lies.

For several years, messages have been accumulating in LinkedIn members’ inboxes, without any possibility to delete them. That’s just plain wrong. But LinkedIn doesn’t seem interested in discussing the matter or better yet, resolve it.

Because of this sorry state of affairs, perhaps members should think twice before posting their private information in a network where all of those “interesting details”, ending up in your inbox or someone else’s, may never be deleted, ever.

If LinkedIn is acting in your best interest, it just doesn’t end up looking that way, at all…

Tags: linkedin, delete, delete button, inbox, feature, business messages, contacts, privacy, member privacy, user privacy, use of information, archive, receive, send, messages, social network, business social network, rights, user rights, can’t delete email messages in inbox, linkedin inbox problem, no way to delete messages in linkedin

What’s so special about Microsoft’s Bing search engine?

Microsoft tried, with overall mild resolve, to compete with Google and Yahoo! in the search engine arena. Its Live Search service, by all means, didn’t deliver the kind of user experience that generated repeat uses. So they killed that service.

That’s right, the Live Search service is gone!

How’s that for big news?

But there’s even bigger news. The old “live.com” service is officially set to be replaced tomorrow by a new search service called “bing.com“. Another 4-letter .com which is easy to remember and cool to bookmark. That’s pretty much as far as the similarities go, however.

The Bing.com search engine is built, from the gound up, so to speak, to be completely different than Live.com in the sense that it’s more mature and precise. A lot of testing went on using the Live dataset so expect to find in Bing what was available through its [now retired] predecesor.

Steve Ballmer said this about its new web destination: “Bing [will] enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.” at last week’s All Things Digital conference, in Carlsbad, CA.

And gosh, is Ballmer ever fired up about Bing!

According to Microsoft, in addition to offering search by category, Bing will offer…

• more relevant search results;
• snapshots of search results’ Web pages;
• color-coded search results; and
• search tools on the left side of the page.

This new search engine is also set up to organize query results in relevant groups rather than as a series of links. Google might want to pick up on this! So, for instance, a search for “travel to Seattle” may return Seattle destinations like hotels, restaurants and museums as almost a guidebook page. The same search on Live generated straight individual links that users had to go through one by one.

Microsoft has looked for ways to improve its search advertising revenue for years and maybe Bing will give them “more bang for their money”. It’s hard to imagine that advertisers will be leaving Google and Yahoo! for Bing anytime soon but overtime, maybe some people will get curious and want to see if Microsoft go its new search service right, this time around.

Everyone “in the know” regarding the search engine wars was aware that Microsoft’s search market share had been slipping for more than two years. It struggled to make its online advertising unit profitable but that wasn’t going too well. According to comScore, Microsoft maintains a meager 8.2% share of the market for core searches compared with 64.2% for Google and 20.4% for Yahoo!.

After trying a few searches in Bing’s “preview” search service for “new technology“, “local pizza“, “alternative cancer treatments“, “free education” and “open source scripts” yielded impressively relevant results which actually made sense. The pay-per-click results were generally related but not always useful. Maybe when Microsoft convinces more advertisers to sign-up, those results will become more interesting.

You may also appreciate the “quick information” that’s displayed at the right of the hyperlinks [and descriptions] to give you a sort of preview of what you’ll find, at any particular web site. Here again, Google and Yahoo! should send a few spies to check it out.

We’ll need at least a few months to see if Bing has what the users are looking for but until then, it’ll be interesting to see what the competition does to make sure they stay on top.

Tags: bing, about bing, bing.com, bing search, bing search engine, microsoft bing, steve ballmer, ballmer about bing, allthingsd, all things digital, live, live.com, search engine war, google, yahoo!, competition, users, visitors, internet, web, online