Swamp Things – Jesse Planck

Will .EDU become the next splog haven?

Today was the launch of blogs.pi.edu. Is anything sacred? Will .EDU loose that recognition like .ORG did? They say:

Run Your Own EDU Blog – “PI.edu is now offering sub-domain blogs that will allow you to educate your potential customers on your field of expertise. Why PI.edu? Our blogs allow you to reach an education minded audience that is difficult to reach with mass market blogs such as Blogger or Blogspot.”

All that for for the low price of $50.00 a month! Now they do say they will have some sort of “restrictions,” but that statement above pretty much says have a splog site here. Now I’ve seen some accidental splogs under .EDU, and I’ve seen some questionable .EDU domains. Since everyone watched the slow demise of .ORG it doesn’t surprise me that the venerable, restricted .EDU would start getting chipped at.

Okay, but it could be very bad considering that EDUCAUSE Amendment (6) part 1 – subpart 4 (PDF) says something like:

“No name registered in .EDU domain may be intentionally deployed to identify any organization other than the Registrant itself…”

BUT it continues on to say

“… while ANYNAME.REGISTRANT.EDU has no such limitation.”

Also check out the EDUCASE policy itself.

I couldn’t find anything to counter the possiblity that this could become a splog gateway into the .EDU namespace. I do know from that messages passed through UDWEB that EDUCUASE is already getting calls about it.

Ouch.

[Update] Shut down blogs.pi.edu by ZDNet‘s Christopher Dawson — A newly-launched site called blogs.pi.edu is happy to sell you your own blog with a .edu domain for the low low price of $50. LinkAdage is partnering with the Pickering Institute to sell canonical domain names using the valid pi.edu domain, lending the credibility of a .edu domain to such sites as handbags.pi.edu and […]

[Update] A good original source of this story – LinkAdage Selling .EDU Blog Space: It’s Evil by Ian Lurie

Posted

in

by

jess

Tags:

,

Comments

6 responses to “Will .EDU become the next splog haven?”

  1. Jess Planck Avatar
    Jess Planck

    Blogs.Pi.Edu Standards – Pickering Institutes Blog standards category.

    Reply
  2. Jess Planck Avatar
    Jess Planck

    Online College Faces Criticism for Renting Out Space on ‘.edu’ Domain – By Jeffery R. Young – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    Reply
  3. Jess Planck Avatar
    Jess Planck

    Geez. I am a moron. I forget sometimes… “.ORG” was originally labeled as miscellaneous. There were discussions before it’s transition to the public to make it restrictive to “non-profit organizations”, but it remained open to all registrants. It was an “almost” issue at a previous job because we had a lot of “.org(s)” that were bugging us because somewhere there was some sort of announcement about possible new restrictions… This is ancient history, so don’t ask me how it got embedded in my brain.

    Reply
  4. Jess Planck Avatar
    Jess Planck

    Questionable use of “.edu” is not uncommon. Here’s one: America.edu Student Journals. America.edu itself is a non-educational institution offering reviews of American Colleges and Universities.

    Reply
  5. Jess Planck Avatar
    Jess Planck

    From a comment on Ian Lurie’s article: Hawaii Civil Enforcement Lawsuit against Pickering University. Basically stopped Pickering University in Hawaii. It will be interesting to see how this goes with EDUCAUSE. I’ll probably check this out again in about 45 to 60 days.

    Reply
  6. Jess Planck Avatar
    Jess Planck

    Diploma mill renting .edu blog space for $50 a month by Nate Anderson for Ars Technica.

    Reply

Leave a Reply