From: Brian from Nambucca Graphics 
Sent: Sunday, 11 January 2004 2:56 PM
To: Jo Lim
Subject: RE: auDA consultation - community geographic 2LDs

Hello Jo,

My main comment about the geographic 2LDs is that that are not needed and totally 
destructive of the aims they claim to promote.

There are already too many town portal sites. Almost every community already has 
multiple websites trying to be a town or regional portal.

Let's face it, we already have the following options for town or region
portals:-

town.com.au
town.net.au
town.asn.au
town.nsw.gov.au
town.com
town.net
town.info

In addition to the above examples we have all the portal sites with domain names like 
"townonline" or "town-online" dot this and dot that.

Most of these portal or gateway sites are ambitious visions which never remotely go 
close to realising their goals for the following reasons:-

There are too many competing portals all trying to serve the same purpose. Furthermore, 
few site site managers ever assemble sufficient content, sufficient recognition, 
sufficient momentum, sufficient commitment from volunteer workers or sufficient 
commitment from the community it claims to serve.

Allow me to illustrate the point. In my own small shire of a mere 17,000 people there 
are already numerous portal sites. Some of these  have already received MASSIVE 
financial grants under the Federal Governments "Networking the Nation" initiative yet 
have still FAILED to meet their goals and ultimately closed down when the money ran out.

Here are the portals for our very small Nambucca Shire community:-

www.nambucca-web.com
(commercial local portal with 6 year history)

http://www.communityonline.com.au/
(hobbyist local portal with 7 year history)

http://www.nnsw.com.au/nambuccaheads/
(commercial town portal with 7 year history)

www.coastcall.com
(recently failed portal after expending over $500,000 Federal Govt dollars)

www.enambucca.com
(recently failed portal after expending over $120,000 in Federal Govt funds)

www.nambucca.net
(recently failed portal)

http://www.coffscoast.com.au/nambuccavic.htm
(regional tourism portal)

www.nambuccatourism.com
(shire tourism portal)

www.nambucca.nsw.gov.au
(shire council website & semi portal)

The list above is far from exhaustive and there are a number of other local portal initiatives 
in our which focus on individual towns or villages within the Nambucca Shire. A tiny minority 
of these attempted portals contain any significant content and few last more than a year or 
two. Yet surely "useful content" is the only logical and meaningful measure of a regional 
portal.

The story illustrated above is typical of almost every region in Australia.

I own and operate the first mentioned portal site in the above list. Nobody else in my Shire 
has put in the huge amount of time or the PERSONAL dollars into developing the website, 
filling it with useful content and promoting it with search engines. Note that I have kept 
the portal flourishing and survived in spite of massive (wasted) government funding to groups 
of well meaning volunteers who have attempted but failed to emmulate and compete against my 
own project.

Having survived the threat of Federal Government financial largesse I now find myself 
threatened by the creation of geographic 2LD's the registration of which is closed to me. 
Past experience proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that very few useful or long lived portal 
sites will result from the initiative but it WILL succeed in totally muddying the waters making 
it very very difficult for even a good regional portal to gain any prominence.

If the geographic 2LD's are only about generating registration revenue then my comments will 
be totally ignored. However if you genuinely wish to foster regional portal sites which serve 
a valuable service you will either about this initiative. Alternatively you could limit these 
domain names to parties who already  have a proven track record of amassing regional content 
and gaining site prominence for the portal in important search engines. This also happens to 
be the best way of building a good profile for the geographic 2LD concept and thereby ensuring 
registration longevity.

Incidentally, I also have other experience with regional portal websites. For example I have 
long managed the Shark Bay WA portal at www.sharkbay.asn.au

I would be happy to further discuss any aspect of the geographic 2TD's initiative over the 
phone.

Best Wishes,
Brian Tonkin
Nambucca Graphics