Well, I hope their public relations folk are well rested, because they may need to use their spinning techniques on the tech-loving public once more.

Why, you may ask?

Well, as pointed out by an astute Rogers customer, John Forsythe, Rogers is actively hi-jacking unused domain names, as a “clever” means of scooping up type-in traffic for monetization purposes. Specifically, they’re re-directing unused domain names to their own pages, with Yahoo advertising on the top.

Mr. Forsythe blythely points out that this even extends to subdomains that don’t exist on real domains that do. For example, there’s the ironic example of the non-existant subdomain of Google (example.google.com) which redirects to a page with Yahoo advertising.

Yes — wtf indeed.

Even if this doesn’t raise your ire, if you own a blog or website of any kind, you can see how it might, in fact, cause that rising sensation of bile in your throat, because Rogers (in Canada, anyway) is monetizing subdomain traffic from *YOUR* domain as well.

As John recalls, this isn’t the first time this kind of type-squatting chicanery has ever taken place; VeriSign had tried something like this in 2003, and as a result had a huge bulge in its traffic numbers, with its own site VeriSign.com becoming the 20th most visited (and then reaching the 10 ten) site on the Internets. Yes, the numbers were provided by Alexa, but it still gives some scope of the kind of traffic bumpage these kind of shennanigans can provide.

Eventually VeriSign and ICANN settled things, but it carries on for quite a few cable companies in the States; Rogers, I believe is the first Canadian one to adopt these kinds of practices.

This issue is a hotly contested one, and having exceeded the limits of what I actually know about the topic (extremely minute) in the first paragraph, I’ll kick it back to an interesting discussion at BroadBand Reports.

Post Script: In spite of the unashamedly attention-grabbing headline, unlike the iPhone which has mass commercial appeal, and in spite of the fact there are real issues around the concept of ‘neutrality’, I think its doubtful that this topic will ever raise enough ire to get to the mainstream press.

// via: reddit

One is an AP report that goes into great length over how PC sales in Japan are declining quarter after quarter, representing 5 straight quarters of declining sales.

The other is a PC World report that says this Christmas, PC sales, in particular, laptops, should be booming, and is in fact, part of a greater trend towards better sales — not only in the US, but also in Europe.

While it would be tremendously tempting to say that Japan is a barometer for future technological trends (even more tempting to say ‘for all of Asia’, but that’s something that I wonder if South Korea has the title for), I think that its worth mentioning that the entire tech infrastructure in South East Asia is totally and entirely different than what exists in the West.

Although broadband is cheap and plentiful, the level of wireless sophistication is probably at a level that for a variety of reasons, will probably remain unmatched – and probably never find an equivalent for — in the States and Canada.  Perhaps less so, Europe.  There’s also a tremendous heritage, one might say, in other technologies, such as console gaming — which takes the bite out of needing a PC to conduct gaming activities.

For all of these reasons it makes a lot of sense that much interest is in mobile and consumer technologies because the wireless infrastructure exists for some really fantastic stuff, much of it as good as, or eclipsing tethered/desk top technologies — even though, as the PC World article states, prices for PC components are falling.

I don’t think the popularity of the PC in the US and Canada will ever really decline so long as we don’t have the ability — or, really, even the demand (although how can one demand something one has never experienced?) — for the kinds of technologies that exist in Japan and South Korea … what remains to be seen is how these kinds of trends will continue to diverge over time.