The organisation of the internet was in the news last week, with the announcement from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body ultimately responsible for allocating internet addresses) that it ia about to expand the number of top level domains (TLDs) available. The TLD is the bit of your domain name after the last dot: the com, or uk, or info, or ru.

As those examples show, there are two kinds of TLD, the country codes (.uk, .ru, .fr and so on) and the international domains (.com, .info, .org – we tend to behave as if these were the property of the US, but in theory at least they are equally valid for all countries). (There’s a helpful list on Wikipedia, which explains in detail some points I have simplified here).

There are good arguments for being more flexible about the two letter country codes, if only to allow countries where the Latin alphabet is not used to have web addresses in their own language: if I were a Hellene, I might not be happy to have my website at a .gr address (representing "Greece", a name I didn’t call my country in a script I didn’t write in). Russia and China are two powerful countries who might also have something to say on this topic.

What will the additional general TLDs be, and what will they mean for us? We don’t entirely know yet: ICANN’s announcement says that the implementation plan is still being finalised, and will be published early in 2009. But they do give some examples of what is proposed:

"This proposal allows applicants for new names to self-select their domain name so that choices are most appropriate for their customers or potentially the most marketable. It is expected that applicants will apply for targeted community strings such as (the existing) .travel for the travel industry and .cat for the Catalan community (as well as generic strings like .brandname or .yournamehere). There are already interested consortiums wanting to establish city-based top level domain, like .nyc (for New York City), .berlin and .paris."

So someone might register.bank, and sell .bank addresses to – well, to banks. Or .shopping, and sell addresses to shops. While ICANN’s examples focus on organisations who want a domain which promotes who they are, other applicants will presumably want domains which they can sell profitably. There is a well-established lobby to establish a .xxx (or, indeed, .sex) domain for ‘adult’ sites, and ICANN give no indication of whether this may now be approved (though they do spell out that they will try to pass this hot potato on to "an international arbitration body utilizing criteria drawing on provisions in a number of international treaties" rather than make the decision themselves).

The Guardian predicts a "new net goldrush", as companies stampede to register every possible variation of their name: they quote Thomas Herbert of web hosting company Hostway:

"If the domain name system is completely relaxed, cybersquatting will turn into a far greater problem, with companies struggling to protect their websites and intellectual property… For example, Amazon would have to register many more domain names including Amazon.amazon, amazon.shopping, amazon.electronics."

To the extent that the expansion does seem to be driven by the desire for profit, I suppose that could happen; and I’m sure that some companies will panic and splash out on multiple versions of their domain, just as they do at present. Cornwell Internet already advises clients which of the options available they should register (.com, .org, .co.uk, .info – there’s quite a long list) . Occasionally it makes sense to have more than one, but we don’t recommend trying to collect the set. Sometimes there are perfectly good reasons why someone else wants ‘your’ name (www.juliadarling.co.uk and www.juliadarling.com are two different people, as are www.jennylewis.org.uk and www.jennylewis.com) and neither of you should be able to bar the other from the web! If someone has more sinister motives, well, there are laws against trying to gain an advantage by pretending to be someone you aren’t. Better to invoke those than try to think of every possible option: if someone is determined to impersonate you on the web, they can always find another domain to use.

So we don’t expect Cornwell Internet to be directly affected by these changes: we’ll wait and see what TLDs are released, whether it’s a fixed list or a free-for-all, and how much it’s likely to cost. On the other hand, we’re happy to advise about the existing TLDs. ICANN’s statement says "Presently, users have a limited range of 21 top level domains to choose from — names that we are all familiar with like .com, .org, .info." But you might not be familiar with .cat (for websites in the Catalan language or related to Catalan culture). Or .coop (for cooperatives as defined by the Rochdale Principles). And Roger points out that there is currently a special offer on .eu domains, and that if any of our clients is interested in emphasising the European nature of their activities, now would be a good time to contact him about it!

I am reliably informed that you can’t have too many cat pictures – and I’ve just added Alan Mann’s account of the cats in his life to his reminiscences of life in Tenerife.

Being small can mean you’re more manoeuvrable, too. A week ago, we came home from a Friday afternoon out to find a message on the answering machine from Anne Fine: she and some colleagues were about to launch a campaign against "age banding" of children’s books (Philip Pullman explains here what the campaign is about), and urgently needed – at least – an e-mail address to which people could send messages of support.

A phone call later, Cornwell Internet was on the case: and by Monday, not only were those messages flooding in, the campaign’s policy statement and a list of supporters were available for everyone to read at NoToAgeBanding.org.

We can’t promise this sort of speed every time: not only is NoToAgeBanding built on a very simple design, we were lucky that we had time in hand to deal with it. And some credit for this should go to the Crime Writers’ Association: the shortlists for their Dagger Awards for the year’s best crime writing were announced on Tuesday 3rd June. This could have meant that we’d be tied up for a couple of days beforehand, preparing to upload the information to their site as soon as it was public – but in fact our contacts at the CWA were so efficient that we were ready well in advance, and publishing the pages we had prepared was a small job.

We were very sorry to hear at the weekend of the death of Michael Standen, editor of Other Poetry, poet, writer of short stories, translator and collaborator, treasurer of Colpitts Poetry and a congenial presence at their readings. As Jo Colley wrote in her poem for his 70th birthday celebration in 2007, "He’s a dude, he’s a mensch, he’s a real good egg" – and he is going to be very much missed.

P.S. I have here stopped short of the man’s own site, which refers to him as "Michael Frederick George Standen". But I have at least used the name ‘Michael’, rather than ‘Mick’. A quick reference to Google confirms that ‘Mick Standen’ is more widely known than his more formal counterpart: including one, to me at least, unexpected connection.

Cornwell Internet are now returned from our holiday in the Northern Isles, and we’ve been busy catching up with work; but even while we were away, work was never entirely out of our minds – it’s fortunate that we really do love our job!

We spent a week in Orkney, where we have been several times before; then it was on to Shetland to join the celebrations for Ann Cleeves‘s new book, the second in her Shetland Quartet, White Nights. We had beautiful bright weather, and the long summer evenings referred to in that title, and ended up making plans for our next visit to Shetland!

The islands also made a good impression on Claire Breton, shown in the picture above with Ann at Busta House. Claire is Ann’s French translator, and she takes that task so seriously that she decided to visit Shetland in the interests of research (and for a holiday, too!). We asked her if she’d learned anything helpful, and she gave us this example: "There’d be something in the book about the wind, and I’d translate it as ‘a gentle breeze’ – but now I know that in Shetland, the wind blows all the time, and it’s a strong wind, too!"

We knew that our time in Shetland would connect with the part of our work that deals with Ann’s web site – but we had a surprise reminder of another client, too. We lunched at the Northern Lights gallery and café on Unst, way up north, and while we were enjoying our crab salad realised that we were hearing some very familiar music: a selection of sixties pop songs from the Heartbeat soundtrack. The proprietor told us that she was a big Heartbeat fan, and was thrilled that Nick Berry, Constable Nick in the early shows, was booked in with her for dinner later that week, while he was in Shetland for an Cancer Research fundraising event!

And talking of Constable Nick, we were delighted, on our return to learn that the original Constable Nick (Nicholas Rhea, real name Peter N. Walker) has been honoured with a Lifetime Achievent Award at the 2008 Yorkshire Rural Awards: congratulations, Peter!

Yesterday Cornwell Internet attended the funeral of our oldest client, Ted Rogers, who was also my uncle.

When you have known someone all your life, it’s easier to take for granted how exceptional they are. Ted was severely burned during the war, and underwent extensive – and pioneering – plastic surgery, despite which he was extensively scarred for the rest of his life, particularly on his face and hands. Yet when he was able to, he returned to physical outdoor work: he was a bricklayer – by choice, when his brothers all worked in the professions, the Excise and the Inland Revenue, a teacher and a pharmacist. When his sons were old enough, and there was a little money to spare, he and his wife Enid bought a boat, a fifty year old ketch which they restored and sailed round the Mediterranean. In Malta, they saw a boat being built of ferro-concrete, and decided that they too would built a boat – which they named Phoenix, and sailed across the Atlantic. Off Florida, they struck a coral reef, and Phoenix was wrecked

This should be the end of the story – it is the point at which Ted ended his autobiography, Journeyman – but Ted and Enid returned to Crawley and resumed their lives. They had been founder members of Crawley Communist Party, and helped organise the rent strike of 1955; they continued to be active in the peace movement. Ted was a founder of Ex-servicemen’s CND, a contributor to the Peace Garden in a local park, a member of the Campaign against Racism and still attending union meetings shortly before his 90th birthday.

The family had gathered in February to celebrate that birthday; yesterday we met again, together with friends and comrades, in the Friends’ Meeting House in Ifield, to remember a many faceted man, an activist who charmed others into activity, a lover of people and of poetry. His grand-daughter read O’Shaughnessy’s Ode, one of the many poems Ted had loved and could quote at length from memory:

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamer of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

In Journeyman Ted describes the wreck of the Phoenix:

Now, the larger dinghy had its side stove in, and one of the buoyancy compartments had been opened up on the second dinghy. I felt that our position would soon become untenable. Enid thought it already had. Very generously, she gave me a little smile, and said, "Well, it’s been nice knowing you."

It has, indeed.

That’s the headline of an item I provided for BackBytes, a blog from Computing magazine. Let me fill in the details…

Choosing the right domain name for your site is one of the important decisions you have to make. But once you have made that choice, should you set about buying all the possible variants? Well, no, it’s an almost bottomless pit. Should you buy some of them? Well, maybe, and each case has to be considered on its merits. If you’re a financial institution it makes sense to buy names that might otherwise be acquired by fraudsters. And I noticed with some amusement that grauniad.co.uk has been registered by the Guardian newspaper, presumably to stop Private Eye doing so.

But on the other hand, it’s perfectly possible to have domain names that are similar but each refer to legitimate web sites. For example, juliadarling.co.uk is the website we continue to maintain for the family of writer Julia Darling, whereas juliadarling.com is the site of the identically named US-based singer-songwriter. And again we chose alan-mann.com for our customer, Alan Mann, who paints trains and boat and planes and much more besides. We couldn’t buy alanmann.co.uk because that belongs to a firm coincidentally in the aviation business and alanmann.com has gone to a US genealogist. These sites have existed alongside each other for many years now without any difficulties arising.

But there are firms out there – Domain Registry of America is a notorious example that I won’t grace with a link – who try to make sales by persuading you to buy variations on your domain name to prevent others from doing so. There’s a particularly nasty scam when somebody rings you up (a client of ours was nearly caught by this) and says they’ve just been approached by a company wanting to register a domain name similar to yours, and saying you have the right to register it (at several times the going rate) providing you do so within the next hour.

Compared to these tactics all that Central Domain Registry of York did was to write to me, on paper, to advise that they’d noticed that cornwell-internet.co.uk was available and suggesting I buy it to avoid somebody else snapping it up. So I visited their site, www.centraldomainregistry.co.uk (again I won’t give them a link) to see what their charges are (£34.50 per year). Just out of interest, I checked whether central-domain-registry.co.uk is available: it is, and if anybody is interested I can get it for you at the knock-down price of £25 all in for two years and still make a fair profit on the deal.

So I wrote to the diary section of Computing magazine, Backbytes, and today they have published it.

At the Blue Room on Sunday, Peter Mortimer, as his contract with Cornwell Internet requires, handed us a copy of his latest book, Mortimer at Large – a collection of the weekly columns he writes for the News Guardian. We opened it at the first of these columns, and read the first line: “You’ll have read the local headline: ‘Granny scoops £300,000 Book Deal!'”

Aha, a reference to another of our clients!

This morning’s Guardian has a centre spread of images from this year’s Wellcome Image Awards (formerly the Biomedical Image Awards). This may sound gruesome and unattractive (the winning image shows a mouse embryo, using a new technique to colour individual organs without having to cut sections; another shows meningitis bacteria), but in fact all the images are fascinating, and some are very beautiful. The liquid crystal seen through polarised light would make a lovely cotton print for a summer dress; a single breast cancer cell looks like an alien space ship from a superior science fiction novel. But my favourite (and a “special winner”shows Crystals of oxidised Vitamin C like golden suns and sea creatures stored in a collector’s cabinet.

The images will be on display in the Wellcome Collection Atrium, Euston Road, London, until the summer.

Which coincides very neatly with Cornwell Internet’s current piece of work in progress, a web site for a Wellcome Trust funded project by artist Susan Aldworth, writer Valerie Laws and sculptor Eleanor Crook. The This Fatal Subject site is still in its early stages, but the artists involved are blogging the project as it develops.

The Guardian for 15th February 2008 carried an interesting feature about sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, which for whatever reason does not appear on the paper’s web site; (this Wikipedia entry brings together a number of links for further reading).

The Guardian’s article centred on Venkatesh’s new book, Gang Leader for a Day, whose title suggests the unusually hands-on nature of his research into the economics of the ghetto. It quotes him as saying “In grad school, you’re left alone for a few years to go out and find something to study. A lot had happened before I met my advisers to show them my notes, and that’s when they said, ‘OK, you shouldn’t be doing this.'”

What he needed was Tome Reader ©!