I'm heading out to Las Vegas this morning for the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. West Conference that will be getting underway this evening at the Venetian Hotel. T.R.A.F.F.I.C. opens with a 5:30pm 

cocktail party followed by an 8pm no or low reserve live auction of 50 domain names that will be conducted by Moniker, who will also conduct the main live auction under the SnapNames Live banner Wednesday afternoon (Feb. 20) starting at 3:30pm (U.S. Pacific time). 

After tonight's opening T.R.A.F.F.I.C. festivities I will join my fellow co-founders, Sahar Sarid, Jeff Bhavnanie and Darren Cleveland to host the launch party for Bido.com at the Tao Nightclub starting at 10pm. With a cross country flight and all of those activities 

still ahead this day probably won't end until 4-5am in my home Eastern time zone, so if you are looking for me in Las Vegas this evening, just look for the nearest coffee urn! 

Starting tomorrow I'll post a daily item from T.R.A.F.F.I.C. in this column. Then, as always, the week after the show concludes, we will publish our comprehensive conference wrap up on the home page. 

Before heading out, I want to point you to a very interesting and encouraging page posted by the owners of Kooks.com who are fighting a reverse hijacking attempt by suing a company that is trying to steal their generic name. We will see more and more of these reverse hijacking attempts in the months and years ahead (ways to combat that trend will be talked about by the Internet Commerce Association (InternetCommerce.org) at T.R.A.F.F.I.C.). It is costing the Kooks.com owners a lot of money to defend their rights and this kind of costly litigation could befall any generic domain owner unless new rules or laws are enacted to prevent this kind of attempted theft.
(Posted Feb. 18, 2008)