Yes, unlike last year, Domainz is advertising an contact email address and phone number which will be monitored over the break!

It appears we finally have some commonsense prevailing within the organisation which provides a key infrastructure service to the New Zealand Internet.

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Will 2001 Be The Year Of...
Yes, we stand on the dawn of a new millennium (last year was just a rehearsal you know) and I can't help wondering if any of the over-hyped technologies and plans that were supposed to be big in 2000 will call next year "their year."

Take WAP for instance -- What A Pretender!

Every man and his dog rushed their content into the WAP space -- without any real idea how they were going to make money from it.

This was certainly true in the news industry, with anyone who is anyone offering a wap-version of their headlines and stories -- but why? How on earth are they going to make money out of WAP when they can't even spin a dollar out of the Web?

Then there's streaming media (again).

Even though broadband Internet access has really taken off this year (albeit still accounting for only a small percentage of connections), streaming media has yet to become a viable way to make money -- unless you're a porn star.

I've read a number of reports which indicate that even those with broadband access are bitching that streaming video is a disappointment, lacking both quality and quantity of content.

And by the way -- what ever happened to the year of the paperless office?

Yo Ho Ho versus Ho Ho Ho
I wonder how many people are going to get music CDs for Christmas this year?

I wonder how many of those CDs will be copies of popular albums which have been downloaded from the Internet as MP3s and then burnt to a disk?

Certainly many of the top-rating albums have been appearing regularly on newsgroups such as alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.2000s and I hear they're being traded with great vigour via IRC and the various file-exchange networks running on the Net.

And, to make your pirated music CD look just like the real thing there's now even a newsgroup called alt.binaries.pictures.cd-covers in which you'll find scans of the original CD inserts that can be printed on your inkjet to provide that "professional" finish.

Of course you could always rush down to the Warehouse or log in to an online music store and buy a legal copy -- but for some Net users that would be far too simple wouldn't it?

Aardvark Weekly, Have You Got Yours?
Yes, it's still trickling out -- but the Aardvark Weekly subscription list has grown enormously over the past two weeks which has required a bit of a change to the back-end here so there's still going to be a few who haven't received the latest edition. My apologies.

If you want to subscribe, just drop me a note and I'll put you on the list.

As always, your feedback is welcomed and...

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