A LARGE marketer of financial services is seeking to become the master of a domain name.TIAA-CREF's "Manifesto" Ad The marketer is TIAA-CREF, which is making a significant change in its advertising that plays up its status as a nonprofit organization. The campaign, getting under way this week, signals its intent by focusing on a new Web site, powerof.org.
Public Interest Registry (PIR.org) is the first, and I believe only registry to put a stop to "domain tasting" by imposing a fee "to taste" .Org domains.
Those of us that hold .Org domains will likely do well to work on building upon PIR's effort to add weight and credibility to the .Org TLD.
That credibility already has some real world gravity arising from the number of industry organizations, NPO, etc. that choose to associate their website with the .Org gTLD.
Since it was and remains an open and unrestricted gTLD that means anyone, including spammers, can use the gTLD but - again, unlike other extensions, particularly the .info gTLD - they don't routinely run $.99 cent registration specials. I suspect those "buy 'em cheap or get 'em free" specials run by the .info registry have done more harm than good for .info.
