Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

And what a week is has been – with all sorts of amazing announcements, reversals and more on the Australian Domain Registration front with Bottle Domains and the auDA (Australia’s Domain Name Authority) slugging it out in the Supreme Court. This press release sum sit up well - auDA recklessness damages Australian domain industry

More Announcements:

Andy and Carrie Lee had their little baby. There was no sign of facial hair (fortunately!)

Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Microsoft Office System due to ship April 28th

Exchange 2010 Beta Released

Office 2010 announced – official press release - Next Wave of Microsoft Office Products Will Redefine How People Work

Updated Version of Outlook Connector 12.1 Available

And some other news:

Translate Your Outlook Emails into Other Languages

Word Team Blog blogger Joannie Stangeland started up a vodcast series called A Writer's Guide to Microsoft Office.

Tonight the site WMpoweruser leaked the image of the Zune HD – and world is awash with rumours surrounding its specs and capabilities – looks like a device that is way in front of any Apple iPod products with rumours of HDMI, HD display, touch screen, HD Radio and WiFi.

Robin Good has a fantastic guide on How To Blog Anonymously And Maintain Control Of Your Personal Privacy. He lists techniques, tools and other strategies.

He also has written this one How To Embed And Display RSS Feeds On Any Web Page: Best RSS-To-HTML Publishing Tools – linking to lots of great tools.

As hurricane Gustav hits New Orleans we are tracking its progress with more than just curiosity from this side of the world. For all the news step by step from the Zipa building in Poydras Street in New Orleans check out the www.gustavbloggers.com website. Our domain name registrars DirectNic are located there. After there fantastic work to stay online during Katrina we determined to stay with them and have increased our domain name holdings with them since then. They have expanded also and now have massive redundancy and server centres in Chicago, Houston and Naples, Florida so they are not expecting any outages.

I note with sadness that this hurricane has already costs many deaths in the outlying islands of Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba and Dominican Republic.

This could have massive repercussions with domain name registrations. I am still trying to get my head around it.

The guardian writes this:

Icann, the organisation that regulates the internet domain name system, has passed a landmark vote to relax rules limiting web addresses to "top-level" suffixes, such as .com and .uk, a move that could see people and companies register almost anything they want.

The unanimous vote, held in Paris today, also approved a second proposal to allow domain names written in languages other than English, such as Arabic.

Today's Icann vote effectively means that Coca Cola could, for example, register .cocacola; or that a person could have a web address ending with their surname.

Individuals will be able to register a domain based on their own name, as long as they can show a "business plan and technical capacity".