Comparison is often made between “Christmas time” when retailers go crazy and other big events causing an uplift in sales, visits, profit, etc. For example, those huge lines outside Apple stores when a new iPhone is released, the school holidays for a water park or on a smaller scale, Sizzler might get excited and load up the salad bar on pension day. For bookmakers, its Melbourne Cup, there is no event like it. The traffic (visitors) to the website is 100x the average Saturday, unlike the retailers though, we’re just lucky we don’t have to find a car park during the madness. This year, we’re getting behind some great $400 bonus bet offers at bookmaker.com.au.

I laughed last Christmas when the General Manager of the local Westfield shopping centre was on a short TV spot on the 6 o’clock news, he said “It’s Christmas time, this is our [retailers] Melbourne Cup”, it’s great to see the comparison being made the other way around!

Enjoy race 7 ladies and gents.

Ever since we bought our house we have wanted to get a puppy. The search to find the exact puppy Helen wanted was long and stressful. We wanted to find puppies for sale from a quality cattle dog breeder. We were chasing down a plain face (no mask) female, blue cattle dog. The first one we found ended up being the wrong colour (red) because cattle dogs are born completely white and then become red or blue within the first few weeks, the breeder got mixed up and couldn’t tell the colour. This was a horrible experience, knowing that you don’t have a puppy after 5 weeks and the thought of “giving it up” and hoping that it finds a new family

We found out later from other breeders that this is a rookie mistake, you can easily tell if they are red or blue from birth based on the tint in their skin or colour of their paws apparently. Anyway, the next puppy we found was gorgeous, we went through the entire process again. On the 6th week we were excited about going to see her on the coming weekend a week before we would bring her home. We got an email from the breeder saying that she had lost two of the pups to a snake. Whatever we thought about the process being hard before, just became devastating. You start questioning yourself “Is this telling us we shouldn’t have a puppy” etc.

After a long wait and remaining in contact with the breeders for months, we finally found out that a trusted breeder in north Queensland had a puppy for us. At first it is hard to get attached as you don’t want to be let down again, but as 8 weeks approached it was very exciting. Our cattle dog puppy flew in (to Brisbane) from Nth Qld with a brother from the same litter. She was so tiny, smaller than we expected, but so beautiful. If you want to read more about Tessa, visit her dedicated site to read a Diary of an Australian Cattle Dog.

Long time, no blog. But I have some exciting news.

We’ve just soft launched our new horse racing portal at HorseRacing.com.au. Our business acquired the domain name late 2010 and we started plans for the site immediately. There’s only a few pages live at the moment covering some of the biggest group races in Australia and also some of the major Australian racecourses. But, this site is going to be massive so keep an eye on it. In the near future we will have full horse, jockey and trainer profiles, odds comparison, tips and much, much more all on one giant horse racing industry portal.

The site itself is a reasonably simple design, we want to keep it quite light so that come Melbourne Cup time we can handle the enormous amount of traffic we will handle (my best guess at this point will be close to, if not more than 1 million unique visitors across our network this year on Melbourne Cup 2011 day alone). Anyway, if you have any questions about the new site, let me know. Don’t forget to leave some feedback in the comments.

The Spring Racing Carnival is upon us. There’s some great racing this weekend at Randwick starting with the Epsom Handicap. We have the Turnbull Stakes on Sunday at Flemington, an absolutely awesome race with more “big names” than The Expendables. Visit my favourite sites for everything you need to know this Spring Carnival:

 2010 Spring Carnival Racing Guide:

• Caulfield Guineas - Date: 9th October 2010
• Caulfield Cup - Date: 16th October 2010
• Cox Plate - Date: 23rd October 2010
• Victoria Derby - Date: 30 October 2010
• Melbourne Cup - Date: 2nd November 2010
• Crown Oaks - Date: 4th November 2010
• Emirates Stakes - Date: 6th November 2010

Use these sites for all of the latest news, results, odds, final field, form guides etc.

The 2010 Melbourne Cup is right around the corner, set to be held on Tuesday November 2 at about 3PM.

As the Melbourne Cup is such a popular event that brings more than just the diehard racing fanatics to the track at Flemington, you should buy your tickets now to guarantee a good view of the race.

Tickets are available from the main Melbourne Cup site, and there are options for restaurant seating and private boxes for those who want more than just general admission. Corporate marquees are also available for those who want to take the usual Cup tradition a little further.

The 2010 Melbourne Cup is looking to be a very good run, with the early nominations for the race suggesting the final field will be truly incredible. It’ll likely be packed full of international runners, too.

While the numbers for 2010 Melbourne Cup nominations are down from 2008, they are up from last year with 253 aspirants hoping to make it into the final field of 24. There were only 230 nominees in 2009, however it included an impressive overseas contingent of 57 foreign horses.

The final Melbourne Cup field will be released on the Saturday October 30 at around 7:30 PM. A lot of casual punters will just start betting then, but the real players are already placing bets right now at online betting sites like SportsBet, which has odds up for all of the Melbourne Cup nominees.

Well, mostly for girls. Pretty much all online bingo sites are targeted at women. Colours, graphics and promotions. It’s true, the market is primarily female, but its just as fun as keno and there are lots of great people online in the bingo chat games that laugh at my jokes.

Some of the chat games in bingo rooms are pretty fun, its like the old IRC channel #frenzy if you ever played. The bingo chat host says “I am thinking of an occupation starting with P” and everyone in the room types out name after name in a guessing frenzy. But that is just one example, the chat games are a fun community game and combined with a live chat host, apparently an extremely good retention tool.

Online bingo is heaps better than playing bingo in real life (apparently, I’ve never been). However I can imagine there’s a lot less old people smell. When playing bingo at an online casino you don’t have to worry about smoking or drinking at the tables, it’s your computer, do whatever you like. Also, “talking” is frowned upon while the numbers are being drawn in a live game, but online you can chat away to your heart’s content. Also, you can buy hundreds of tickets for each game and the computer marks them off for you, and in most rooms, automatically orders your bingo tickets by the one’s most likely to win (least numbers left to go).

I’ve been working on a few bingo sites lately, check out  on of my favourites (UK Bingo) and sign up to some of the online bingo sites and prepare for unlimited fun and games!

I find it amusing to see eBay auctions of .com.au domain names with price tags in the millions of dollars. Today I saw “paris hiltons party” .com.au listed for $5,000,000 (Buy Now). Now I’ve always been a firm believer that “worth” or “value” is only what someone else is willing to pay. However, if someone (stupid) paid $5 million for a domain name like that, does it mean it’s valued at that price? Certainly not. I guess if it went to auction and at least two people were bidding to that price, then maybe. You could always assume that some other stupid person was willing to pay that much, so its “worth” it.

A domain name’s sale price, especially .com.au, is extremely hard to evaluate. There are lots of methods and key indicators the industry uses to value a domain name, such as length (characters), extension (.com.au not .net.au), number of words, hyphenations, spelling, plural/singular, common words, search engine counts, branding ability and so on. There’s also precedent or past sales, this is one of the biggest factors for appraisal of anything, unfortunately, there’s not a lot of data on Australian domain name sales.

I was recently present at TRAFFIC Down Under, for the Aftermarket.com and Rick Latona domain name auctions. I’ve recorded some data that may help you to appraise your domain name. If you have a .com.au domain name for sale, or would like some help with appraisal, I am happy to discuss it with you. The following names (Aftermarket Auction) sold in USD, at the time of the auction the AUD was at 64 US cents.

Hunting.com.au sold for $1,500
JobListings.com.au was passed in with a reserve of $3,000
Undergraduate.com.au sold for $1,600
Camp.com.au sold for $2,600
Jackets.com.au sold for $3,000
Barbecuing.com.au sold for $500
Essays.com.au sold for $1,600
SurfingLessons.com.au sold for $2,200
Shout.com.au sold for $1,000
Rules.com.au sold for $700
Toons.com.au sold for $500
Jeweller.com.au sold for $9,200
Athletic.com.au was passed in with a reserve of $2,000
Knit.com.au sold for $700
Laughter.com.au was passed in with a reserve of $2,000
MensClothing sold for $4,000
CDs.com.au sold for $2,000
Branding.com.au sold for $2,500
Authentication.com.au sold for $500
Pollution.com.au sold for $3,000
Enter.com.au was passed in with a reserve of $2,000
Plans.com.au sold for $2,700
Parasailing.com.au sold for $1,700
DirtBiking.com.au sold for $500
JetSkiing.com.au sold for $2,000
Bake.com.au sold for $800
Broadcasting.com.au sold for $2,000
Up.com.au sold for $2,700

The following names (Rick Latona Auction) sold in USD, at the time of the auction the AUD was at 64 US cents.

Adopt.com.au sold for $400
CampSites.com.au sold for $1,300
CharterAirplane.com.au sold for $2,750
Friend.com.au sold for $3,000
History.com.au sold for $8,500
Instuments.com.au sold for $2,200
Snowboards.com.au sold for $6,000

I intended to post some more commentary about these sales, but it’s dinner time.

Google released its “Streetview” feature on Google Maps today. It is an amazing (free) service that will revolutionise my house hunting efforts. If you are unfamiliar with Google Streetview, it is a add-on feature (to the currently awesome Google Maps product) that allows you to jump down to street level and view photos of almost anywhere you can think of.

Google Streetview Australian Street/Road Coverage

Google Maps is ultra fast vector mapping software that allows you to search the country for streets, roads, parks etc. They also supply a “Satellite View” that allows you to see roof tops and parkland, roadways to sports stadiums.

Earlier in the year (I think this year) Google added street numbers to all the blocks, this added a great amount of win to their already superior service. Every night as we search for real estate, this amazing tool [Google Maps] allows us to find a property, even when the agent doesn’t list the address of said property. We simply look for a unique feature of the house, roof shape, gardens, background landmark or something as simple as the number on the letter box and then we use Google Maps (with Satellite View) to  find it.

Once we locate the block and the address, we used to take a closer look at it from the sky using whereis.com, a Sensis product. The Whereis product used to have far greater zoom ability so we would jump over there. However, not to be outdone, Google (within the last month) upped their resolution and zoom function to an amazingly superior level. You can literally see dogs in backyards, flowers in bloom and even make out the type of material a roof is made of. So forget the Sensis product, it is now (again) too slow, full of ads, and generally an inferior peice of software.

However, today marks another win of epic proportions as Google added the Streetview feature for Australia. We are the third country to receive this awesome technology, after the USA and France!

The photos are generally about 8 months old (I’ve read), and their elite software automatically blurs out faces and number plates. If they happened to miss something, you can report it using a simple form.

Anyway, the product is fantastic. There only seems to be one problem, they forgot the street I live on. I checked our street sign tonight and noticed someone had put a “nofollow” tag on it, I guess that’s why the Google Streetview car skipped us

Something wrong with my META data perhaps?

I ordered a couple of copies of the book about domaining, “The Domain Game” by David Kesmodel. They arrived yesterday. There is a great post at Domain Tools that shows you all of the page references to different people / companies of interest.

David Kesmodel is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. His new book demonstrates how many regular people have become millionaires through owning some of the most valuable domain names.

Working in the industry myself for over 8 years now, I am specifically interested in the references to people and companies I know. Just skimming through it and I am very keen to read it. I am a very slow reader, however this could be the first book I ever read from cover to cover (unless the movie comes out before I finish). I’ll definitely throw a copy next to the toilet and have the other one with me for a few weeks.

Are you looking for a new credit card? We’ve been working on some new comparison tables that allows you to compare credit cards online. Our website also has product profiles for each credit card, bank profiles and issuer profiles (Visa, MasterCard etc). The site is really gaining some traction, we are still ranked number 1 in Google for the term “credit cards” and we’re also picking up some good rankings for a lot of secondary terms.

The credit card and finance verticals are probably the most mature (affiliate) markets in Australia. It’s a very competitive space, there are lots of affiliates and businesses competing for the traffic, generally because there are actually lots of affiliate programs available.

Anyway, our credit card website has been around for a while now (about 18 months) and it is definitely the best credit card comparison site in the market. We monitor and review over 100 different credit cards from all the major banks and building societies. So if you are in the market for a new credit card, check out CreditCards.com.au.