Seems that every 5 minutes some joker comes up with a new TLD (Top Level Domain) to make some bucks. These things are dished out by the administrators of the Internet (ICANN) to various countries. For example in Australia we have the ".au" ending to Australian web addresses, which is then administered by our own domain authority (auDA).  It's just like one giant happy pyramid selling scheme.

Anyway - some bright sparks have worked out that their country name might be worth more than just a country designation... for example the 15 thousand-odd people of the pacific island of Tuvalu have the distinction of having ".tv" as their country designation. Now they signed a deal with a distributor, and get about 4 million USD a year just for the rights to on-sell their country code to every TV station on the planet. Nice earner considering their GDP is only 14 million.

Now the republic of Columbia are trying to do the same with their offering of ".co". With a whole lot of slick marketing they are trying to convince the good people of the world that their domain is the next big thing. Sadly, depending on the response to the hype this may become true. Their angle is that the ".com" tag does not really fit "corporations" or more generic "commerce" as it is generally associated with "companies". They are saying that ".co" will become more recognisable as it is shorter as well, and some countries (like the UK) already use .co.uk as their commercial domain space.

So, the administrators of the .co domain space extract money in two ways - "land-rush" sales and "renewals". In the Land-rush phase, the marketing hype is that to protect your current brandname, you should register your current domains with a .co ending so that your competitors do not. Secondly they are trying to get people to register these domains as their primary domain and finally they appeal to speculators who rush out and grab domains willy-nilly in the hope that "ford.co" can be on-sold to the motor company for tens of thousands of dollars. At $299 pa for the first pass of domains - this can be a tidy little profit for the organisers.

The next phase is what they would hope this settles into eventually. Basically they hope that all the people who register will continue to work and register their domains in their name-space at $29.99 pa, making a nice continual earner for all involved.

So - to buy, or not to buy... that is the question. It's a tough one, and it is hard to pick. This has happened before with domains like .info, .mobi and .asia and I have to say that no name space has yet challenged .com as the primary namespace to do business on the Internet.

Want to buy some quality Columbian domains?

So my best guess is that it will be a lemon, and the only people making money from this will be the Republic of Columbia and the geeks administering the domains.

BUT - if you do have a brand in a very competitive industry/arena that might be threatened by a rival with a similar name, then getting such a name in the ".co" variety might be some cheap insurance. I can also see the logic if you have a business name that ends with "Co" (eg. Fred & Co ) that you might like to shorten your name with the gimmick "fred.co" ... but having said that you would probably keep your .com / .com.au domain as well.

That's my 2 cents worth - but don't blame me if you miss out on fordmotor.co and your neighbour sells it for 50 grand and goes on holidays.