Internet marketing firm Marchex Inc. has finalized a deal to pay a whopping $164.2 million for Name Development Ltd., which displays keyword advertising across a portfolio of more than 100,000 domains. The deal, along with the recent sale of a misspelled domain name for $112,000, offers evidence that mistyped URLs and other "accidental traffic" have become big business.

The pricetag on the sale of Name Development is more than the $155 million paid by SAVVIS Communications to acquire Cable & Wireless America, and nearly as much as the $176 million Freenet paid for the hosting operations of Germany's Tect AG. SAVVIS gained about 350K hostnames in the C&W deal, while Freenet acquired 2.2 million hostnames from Tect.

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The BitTorrent hub LokiTorrent has been shut down by a lawsuit from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), with the eight-hour outage earlier today turning out to be the prelude to a closure. The site came back online briefly with BitTorrent-related content, but within hours that had been replaced by a notice from the MPAA.

"There are websites that provide legal downloads. This is not one of them," reads the new front page of lokitorrent.com. "This website has been permanently shut down by court order because it facilitates the illegal downloading of copyrighted motion pictures." An MPAA press release said LokiTorrent operator Edward Webber agreed to pay "a substantial settlement with even greater financial penalties for any further such actions," and was under court order to provide the MPAA with logs and server data.

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Google is now an ICANN-accredited registrar of domain names, providing it with yet another potential line of expansion. The fast-growing search provider is approved to sell names in seven top-level domains (TLDs) including .com, .net, .org, .biz., info, .name and .pro.

Google's registrar status, first noted by LexText, is likely to prompt speculation about its ambitions in web hosting and blogging. Google operates Blogger, the free blog hosting service with a huge user base. Cheap or free domain names could prove useful to Google in the notoriously price-sensitive blog hosting sector, where most bloggers use subdomains (i.e. myblog.bloghost.com) rather than full domain names (www.myblog.com).

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Domain registrar Melbourne IT today acknowledged that it failed to properly confirm a transfer request for Panix.com, allowing the domain for the New York ISP to be hijacked for most of the weekend. The Panix incident has focused attention on recent ICANN rule changes that allow domains to be transferred more easily, which some registrars warned would also make it easier to hjack domains.

The hijacking disabled all email and Internet access for thousands of Panix customers, and persisted despite active efforts by the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) to assist Panix in recovering the domain. The delays were blamed on unresponsiveness by several providers within the domain management system, but especially Melbourne IT, which appears to have no readily-accessible support on weekends. The Panix.com hijacking was not reversed until Melbourne IT's offices opened in Australia Monday morning (late Sunday in New York).

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The open source Firefox web browser has made headlines as it chips away at the dominant market position of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. But Firefox is also grabbing market share as an RSS reader, according to new data from RSS service provider Feedburner, which says the browser is now the third-most popular RSS client in its usage stats.

Feedburner's data, based on an analysis of its 800 most popular feeds, show that web-based feedreader Bloglines is the clear market leader with 32.8 percent of the volume, followed by the NetNewsWire client for Mac OS X with 16.9 percent. Firefox is next with 7.8 percent, placing it ahead of established RSS clients including Pluck (7.2%), NewsGator (4.5%), FeedDemon (3.8%) and the web-based My Yahoo (2.6%).

The Firefox browser autodetects the availablility of an RSS feed for a site, and can integrate feeds using Live Bookmarks feature or extensions such as Sage.

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