Daily News Roundup 03-4-08

• Tue, 4^th March 2008, 18:50
• Permalink

News from around the web this morning:

1and1 Registers 10 Millionth Domain   

1and1 announced today that they have registered their 10 millionth domain. The press release mentions that they have doubled their domain registrations in the past three years. They are more of a powerhouse than I knew. The number of domains registered in the U.S. by 1and1 increased 46% last year. The .us domain saw a 35% increase.

They also released the results of a study of 1,025 U.S. cosumers and the results are interesting. From the release:

Almost 1 in 4 (22 percent) believed they could build a good website in less than 3 hours, with the average consumer believing they could successfully complete the task in less than 3 days.

Confusingly, the release later repeats the above statement but says 3 hours instead of 3 days. This is good news for web hosts, this confidence will hopefully translate into sales.

Rackspace Rebrands and Gets a New Logo

Rackspace has rebranded themselves, from Rackspace Managed Hosting by dropping the Managed Hosting part to Rackspace, to reflect their "People-centric culture".  The announcement also mention their new logo, incorporating "FANATIGUY" (all caps is theirs, not mine) into the logo to highlight their "Fanatical Support".  If you were thinking about signing up with Rackspace but put off by the "Managed Hosting" in their name, now is the time to move. That plus now having FANATIGUY as part of the logo should only help Rackspace transition into the future. I love marketing! Kidding aside, this announcement highlights their transition from hosting services to consumable services through the web. They are moving from being a hosting provider to offering hosted IT services. I'm glad to see outstanding customer service being used as a selling point. Customer service is what separates the good from the great in hosting.

30% of Wordpress Blogs are Splogs

Wordpress' Matt Mullenweg addressed the Future of Web Apps conference and announced that Wordpress had deleted 800,000 spam blogs (splogs), e-consultancy reports. What are splogs? From the article:

Spam blogs are automated blogs that simply lift the extract from an RSS feed and re-publish with a link, using the stolen content to climb up the search rankings and often cash in with AdSense ads.

Spammers are despicable, and it is worrying to read that statistic. The article also quotes Technorati's boss, Dave Sifry, who recently stated 99% of the pings and updates Technorati recieves are from splogs. Astounding.

Are you a fan of FANATIGUY? Has your site been affected by a splogger? What do you think of 1and1's study? Leave a comment! Thank you.