It's a little-known fact that I used to be a movie critic in the early 80's. You see, I've had a lifelong obsession with movies. In fact, I studied filmmaking in university, worked in the feature film industry for many years, and still watch several movies every week.

As many readers of my blog know, I also have a thing for domain names, so I guess it was inevitable that I would find a way to combine two of my favourite obsessions.

Today, I am thrilled to unveil my latest creation, Hollywoozy (www.hollywoozy.com), the first Website devoted to reviewing movie domain names. That's right, I'm critiquing the domain names used to market movies.

I don't know about you, but over the last five years I started to notice that just about every movie trailer (another obsession of mine, by the way) ended with the display of the official movie Website's address. Many times, the domain name that would be featured in the trailer and other marketing collateral for the movie was laughably bad, at least to my marketer's eye. At first, I found this amusing. Then it became something of a game for me and my wife, as we would patiently wait for the end of the trailer to see how good, or bad, the URL would be.

I soon discovered that I wasn't the only one puzzled by the domain name choices the movie marketers made. A number of my Internet marketing colleagues were equally amused by what appeared to be Hollywood's inability to grasp the importance of having a good domain name when trying to market a multi-million dollar movie. After all, the producers and studios decide years in advance what the title of the movie will be, so there's no excuse for not researching (and securing) the availability of the appropriate movie domain name ahead of time. Yes, even if that - heaven forbid - means buying the domain name from someone who already owns it. If you're spending tens of millions of dollars marketing a movie, spending $10,000 to get the best domain name for the movie is well worth it.

While all of this was rattling around in my head, I was also itching to find a way to return somehow to my film roots. At first I thought I'd start reviewing movies again, perhaps for a publication or Website, but then I realized that the Internet is awash with movie review Websites and blogs, and besides, I had already been there, done that.

Then it hit me ... what about a Website where I reviewed movie domain names? And that's how Hollywoozy was born, although it took me months to come up with the right name for the thing. Naming, yet another one of my obsessions!

Unlike my other online ventures (see sidebar), Hollywoozy is a little less serious, although at its core it is meant to be educational. Hollywoozy also gives me a chance to roll up my sleeves and try my hand at some new (and not so new) Internet marketing techniques. In the coming months, I will be sharing excerpts from my Hollywoozy "Marketing Diary" with you so that you can learn about the techniques I am using to promote the Website and, perhaps more importantly, find out what works and what doesn't.

Before I wrap up, I'd like to thank the gang at Mouth Media for creating the official Hollywoozy logo. They helped turn my crazy idea into a reality.

I hope you enjoy it!

I love it when I stumble across a great Internet marketing case study as I am just going about my day-to-day life.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I took a quick day trip to Buffalo, New York. At one point during the day, we needed to call for a local taxi, so my wife whipped out her mobile phone and began dialing. I was puzzled as to how she happened to have the number of a Buffalo taxi company at her fingertips. So I asked her about this.

As it turns out, my wife - who is the more practical one in the family - knew that we'd need the services of a local cab company while we were in Buffalo, so prior to our trip she had turned to our mutual friend, Google, for help.

It turns out that she had typed "Buffalo taxi" into the search engine. My wife was presented with the first 10 results out of over 3 million. Quickly scanning the Google results page, she saw "Buffalo Taxi Cab" (second from the top) and the URL www.buffalotaxicab.com. And that's what she clicked on. And that's who got my wife's business. (Yes, even with the crappy, one-page Website that currently resides there.)

I was intrigued by all of this, so I asked my wife how and why she chose this particular taxi company. She explained to me that the number one thing that got her attention was the fact that the company had "the best Website address." She went on to explain that, based on the fact that this company was using buffalotaxicab.com as their domain, she figured they were "legitimate" and "had their act together."

My wife is right, of course. buffalotaxicab.com is a terrific generic domain name that not only clearly explains what the company has to offer, it is intuitive from a type-in perspective, and it is also loaded with the keywords that are ideal for high search engine ranking.

The thing I found most interesting was that the clever company that owned this domain name consists of just two guys with two cabs. But by having this great generic domain name, two guys with two cabs beat out dozens of larger competitors for my wife's business.

Way to go, guys. And thanks for planning ahead, honey.

Last week I announced that I would no longer be recording new episodes of my Internet marketing podcast, Marketing Martini.

My podcast?

I realize that some of my loyal blog readers may not have even known I had a podcast since it was a pilot project that I never heavily promoted. (In case you are curious, you can check out the archive of Marketing Martini episodes.)

I thought it would therefore be a good idea to clarify why I made my decision to stop podcasting.

The one thing I want to make perfectly clear is that I am still a big believer in the power and potential of podcasting as a medium in general. What I am no longer interested in, however, is producing my own podcast.

Here's the scoop:

When I launched my Marketing Martini podcast in January 2007, I had a number of goals.

First and foremost, I wanted to better understand the medium of podcasting, and the only way I could do that was to get my hands dirty and produce my own podcast. I certainly ended up learning more than I ever wanted to know about the technical nitty gritty of producing a podcast, and this knowledge proved very helpful to me when I was working at 'The Big Ad Agency'. In fact, I was able to directly apply that knowledge during the production of the podcast the agency produced for General Motors of Canada, "Aesthetic Intent". I was, and still am, very proud of how that turned out.

Second, I wanted to experiment with communicating my knowledge of Internet Marketing through a new medium, which is somewhat ironic since I started my career working in radio over 25 years ago. I discovered that I enjoyed using the spoken word (again) and had fun exploring some of the potential of the medium.

There were also a few other more private goals I had in mind when I launched the Marketing Martini podcast. I should add, however, than none of these goals had anything to do with generating revenue from my podcast; that was never one of my goals.

So why am I hanging up my podcaster's mike?

Quite simply, I achieved the goals I had set out for myself, even my private ones.

Once I realized this, I took a hard look at the time I was spending to produce my podcast. It soon became apparent that (for me, at least) this was a pretty time-consuming endeavor (compared to, for instance, blogging), and was - quite frankly - getting in the way of me pursuing other things, including writing for this blog.

I didn't want to find myself resenting doing my podcast because it was stopping me from launching other projects, so that's why I decided to stop podcasting.

I'd like to thank my listeners - who, interestingly, hail from all around the world - for their loyalty, support and encouragement. Nothing gave me more pleasure than hearing from a listener in a far off place.

Thanks to Mitch Joel and Michael Seaton for inspiring me to begin podcasting in the first place. Keep on podcasting, guys!

And very special thanks to podcasting expert Leesa Barnes who provided some invaluable advice and support during the initial setup of my podcast. I truly couldn't have launched Marketing Martini without her input.

I am already hard at work on my next project, which I will be launching soon, and you, loyal blog reader, will be among the first to hear about it. All I will reveal at this point in time is that it has something to do with domain names. Stay tuned...

P.S. Here are some links to some excellent podcasts that inspired me to become a podcaster:

• Diary of a Shameless Self-Promoter
• Inside PR
• Managing the Gray
• Six Pixels of Separation
• The Client Side Podcast
• Trafcom News Podcast

Enjoy!

From the moment I joined Tucows back in August of 2007, I felt there was an opportunity to improve the way we auctioned off expired domain names. Ten months later, after a ton of work by an army of talented people (go teams!), I can finally reveal that Tucows has collaborated with Namemedia’s Afternic.com to auction our expired domain names.

I am super excited about this because this was by the most challenging -- and therefore fascinating to me -- Internet project I have worked on to date in my career. While on the surface it might seem simple, there were (as my colleague Zeljko would say) lots of moving parts.

You can read all the gory details in the official press release. Then you should head on over to Afternic.com and start bidding on some of the names!