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When was the last time you forgot to renew a domain name? Now if you you're new to the industry then the chances are that a question like that sounds a bit dumb ... you're probably thinking that it's almost impossible to forget to renew a domain and if you only have a couple of domains then you could be right.

But if you've got hundreds of domain names under your control then even the best of us can forget to renew a domain name from time to time. Over the weekend I noticed that one well-known SEO person had forgotten to renew the domain that his SEO blog runs on so, for him, it was rather embarrassing too because lots of people now know that he forgot to do something important.

So let's face it, little people, medium sized businesses and even large corporations do tend to forget to renew important parts of their empire when they forget to renew their domain names. There are also plenty of people out there who don't do enough to protect their domain names and suddenly find that an important domain name has been transferred into someone else's name without their knowledge.

I suppose that that's only to be expected too but ICANN ... the agency in charge of domain names ... is about the last person or company that you would expect to lose their domain name. But they did ... in fact they lost control of two of their most important domain names recently.

Both icann.com and iana.com (iana.com is the branch of ICANN known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) were transferred to someone else and for a while no one at ICANN even knew. Of course, when you're the one in charge of domain names world-wide it doesn't take long to get your domain names back when someone takes them and ICANN had them back within 20 minutes but there's always a lot of embarrassment to deal with after something like that.

Steve and I are currently kicking ourselves that we missed out on what could become two very important domain names in the .mobi area. I suppose we could make all sorts of excuses to explain why we didn't buy them when .mobi names were first released ... like we were busy ... we were distracted with family ... the beach was really nice that day ... but the plain fact is that we were just too dumb to see the importance of .mobi domain names.

I'm not sure that you would need a .mobi domain name regardless of what industry you might work in but if you're doing business in the tourism industry then a .mobi name is going to be a must-have if you want to get your business in front of lots of people. So the sound you can probably hear right now is the sound of Steve and me smacking our heads!

And perhaps the time is not far away where you'll be smacking your heads if you're not paying attention to mobile porn. Unfortunately the industry is still facing a major problem with billing issues when it comes to mobile porn but lots of people are already out there searching for porn on their mobile phones and that means that it's a trend that's going to grow.

Now you might have some real hassles at the moment converting those interested mobile porn surfers into paying customers but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be out there claiming some space on the mobile web and perhaps establishing a brand. If you're not then you might just be spending a lot of time playing catch-up when some of those billing issues are resolved.

Even if you don't want to jump into the mobile space right now you could be spending some time now doing some research into what you need to do to get your sites up there on the mobile Web in a form that people can surf easily.

While we're talking about the mobile space I should also mention a little piece of technology called QR codes. QR codes are very big in Japan and becoming very popular in Europe too.

A QR code looks something like a barcode but it's square rather than elongated like the barcodes that you see on grocery items. If you have a barcode generator ... and there's at least one available online as a Firefox plug-in you generate a QR code for just about any URL you like.

Once you have the code generated you publish it ... as a small addition to some advertising posters or you can include it in an advertisement in a magazine or newspaper. You can even stick it on a shop window and when someone comes along and wants to know more about what you're offering or advertising they point their mobile phone camera at the code.

If the phone is equipped with a QR code reader the camera in the phone scans the QR code and displays the URL on the screen. A couple of clicks later and the owner of the phone is looking at your website and seeing your marketing message.

Think about it ... I'm sure you will see that there are lots of applications for this form of technology and the only thing that is going to limit your use of QR codes is your imagination.