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Last week the world was running out of IP addresses and the good old law of supply and demand was about to come into play. That meant that the prices of IP addresses was going to rise and I'm sure we would have heard a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth if that had happened.

Actually the provision of IP addresses over here in Australia has been a bit of a contentious issue for some time. If we wanted a new IP address for any of our sites hosted in the United States all we had to do was inform our host that we needed a new IP address and it happened but here in Australia things were a little different.

Quite a few hosts here require you to give a reason for wanting a new IP address. And they wonder why some of us think that Australian hosting is still back in the dark ages?

I guess if the world really had run out of IP addresses we might have seen hosts all over the planet demanding reasons to support a request for a new IP address but fortunately ICANN has ridden to the rescue and, with the wave of their magic wand, they've solved the IP dilemma that the world was facing.

To do that they've introduced a new version - version 6 - of the Internet Protocol and on Monday they updated the databases on six of the 13 root servers around the world. The new Internet Protocol version allows IP addresses to be much longer and of course that means that those who stress about the impact of their B, C and D blocks on search engine rankings now have even more to stress about.

While the current protocol - version 4 - allowed for four blocks with up to four digits in each block the new protocol doesn't appear to have blocks as such. Instead a version 6 IP number is one long string of numbers and letters with a bunch of colons thrown in for good measure. If you want to consider the colons as separators then there can be eight sets - or blocks - of mixed numbers and letters.

And just to add a little more complication to those version 6 IP numbers, if any 'block' of numbers consists of four consecutive zeros then they can be replaced with a double colon ... but that can only happen once in an IP address. If a block of numbers begins with a double zero then those two zeros can be omitted completely.

Now won't that be fun for those who want to make sure that the search engines don't see their sites as coming from the same source? I'm sure it won't be long before some people begin to see that as important.

And if you want a really in-depth look at the new Internet Protocol then check out 'IPv6' at Wikipedia. Yes, I did say Wikipedia ... while I rarely recommend that for anything it does seem to have the right information on the new version 6.

Epic Cash Acquired by Deecash
Now there was a surprise a lot of people didn't see. For quite some time the owners of Epic Cash have been making noises on the boards about their business being up for sale but I'm not sure that everyone took them very seriously. But obviously Deecash did because the announcement was made today that Deecash has acquired Epic Cash and Epic Cams.

In the last two years Deecash has been out there acquiring the competition and it will be interesting to see what they do with the Epic Cash sites. Quite a few of the Deecash sites run for a while and then stop being updated so I wonder if the intend to apply the same business model to the sites that they've picked up in their acquisition of Epic Cash.

Build It and They Will Come is a Myth
Now who would have thought that? Certainly not a whole lot of companies that have been trying to build up some form of local search/local news and local interest sites on the Net. A recent study of 80 'local' Internet companies has shown that most of them are not making any money from their business model.

I guess when you look at something like Craig's List it's easy to think that the success of that site can be replicated and even improved on but that's not the reality. For those companies not only have the visitors not come but the advertisers haven't come either.

And there's a lesson there for us. Just because one webmaster, or even a small group of webmasters, is able to develop something that makes money doesn't mean that you can replicate their success. It may be far better for you to look for something new to develop into a cash cow than to copy what others are doing.

That's just something to think about as you look around the Net today and consider how you're going to make your fortune in this crazy industry.