This week, Bob Parsons had Go Daddy’s new spokesman Chad Johnson as a guest on his Internet radio show, the recently renamed Go Daddy Live.

 

Assuming you concern yourself with such things, you’re probably aware of Johnson’s position – flashy Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver. Johnson is a perennial challenger for the league lead in receiving yards, always scoring more than a few touchdowns, and more often than not celebrating those touchdowns in exceedingly theatrical ways.

 

Johnson is regularly fined by the league for his behavior, a fact that was discussed on the Parsons program. He says it doesn’t bother him though. He tries to put a positive spin on it by matching the league fines he faces and donating them to the Feed the Children foundation, a charity with which Johnson does some work.

 

He even said he’s trying to talk the league into making sure the fines themselves go to the same organization.

 

Parsons piped up at that point, promising a donation of $50,000 to the foundation if Johnson were to perform a “Go Daddy dance” as his celebration after a touchdown. Johnson, of course, said he’d try to work it in.

 

All very straightforward, except I was left wondering what exactly I was looking for. What exactly does a “Go Daddy dance” look like?

 

As if they were reading my mind, I received a press announcement form Go Daddy on Friday that, among other things, explained what I’d be looking for:

 

“Chad would be doing the same dance made famous by the original Go Daddy Girl Candice Michelle.

   

"You may recall the GoDaddy Girl commercial was pulled by FOX during the 2005 Super Bowl because the spoof on the Janet Jackson ‘wardrobe malfunction’ was not ‘in keeping with the tenor of the game.’  It aired only once during the 2005 Super Bowl."

 

I do, in fact, recall that dance. For those who don’t, Go Daddy explains:

 

“If you see Chad Johnson highlights after Sunday's game and notice him celebrating with both arms up and his hips swirling... that means the www.FeedTheChildren.org organization will receive a $50,000 donation in Chad's name.”

 

Full disclosure: the Bengals happen to be playing the Seahawks as I write this. And the Seahawks happen to be my team. With all due respect to the children, I’d personally prefer Chad keep his swirling hips out of the end zone until next week.

Lawyers for Gary Kremen, the long-suffering rightful owner of the sex.com domain, issued a press release last week announcing that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had issued an order dismissing the most recent appeal of a $65,000,000 judgment against Stephen Michael Cohen, effectively ending the decade-plus sex.com saga.

Effectively, that is, because Cohen is apparently able to appeal the decision, however the court has warned him that it would "consider imposing sanctions" if he were to do so.

The announcement (justifiably) plays up the significance of the case as a landmark in Internet law and one of the really epic stories of the Internet age. It even references a book that is apparently to be published on the case:

This domain name battle has been so dynamic and had such an impact on the Internet industry that Quercus Publishing PLC has published a new book on the Kremen v. Cohen suit. Authored by Kieren McCarthy, the book is entitled, "Sex.com: One Domain, Two Men, Twelve Years and the Brutal Battle for the Jewel in the Internet's Crown."

I really only take issue with one thing, which is the decision to refer to a URL that pointed for years to a porno-site banner farm as "the jewel in the Internet's crown." Call me old fashioned, but I feel like there may be a bit of a sophistication gap in that comparison. And I'm not even English.

I do understand the comparison, however, in terms of a small thing having an enormous value - in this case, six characters and a punctuation mark leading to Cohen owing Kremen an eight-figure US-dollar amount.

Sex.com is possibly the most inherently valuable domain name, in terms of the amount of type-in traffic it did, and probably still does, receive, along with the nature of that traffic and the potential for turning it into clicks - particularly clicks that eventually lead to money spent.

For those really really late to the ballgame, I'll try to sum up the back story in a few sentences. Kremen registered the domain back in '94. Cohen used a fraudulent fax to convince the registrar (Network Solutions) to transfer the domain to his possession. He set up a banner/links farm on the page that reportedly generated between $50,000 and $500,000 per month, and continued to operate that site until 2000, when the courts ordered Network Solutions to return the domain to Kremen. Cohen has since been appealing rulings that he pay Kremen $65,000,000, an amount that includes $40,000,000 in lost earnings. Kremen has since sued VeriSign and Network Solutions for, you know, giving his super-valuable domain to some guy without asking him. Cohen also left the country during the legal-battle period and was arrested in Mexico in 2005.

You know, it might actually be an interesting book.

As far as the press release was concerned, though, it seems worth commemorating the apparent conclusion of the case simply for the impact it had on the development of the notion of ownership relative to domains. Particularly in the July 2003 ruling that domains do, in fact, constitute property in the traditional sense - the ruling that enabled Kremen to sue VeriSign over the unauthorized transfer.

The announcement quoted Richard Idell, of the lawfirm Idell & Seitel, which represented Kremen in the case:

"The underlying case to this appeal rewrote the law, and shaped the history and development of the Internet as we know it. Hopefully, the result here will send a loud and clear message that the decision stands and is the future of the Internet domain name business."

On Friday, a colleague sent me a link to the Silicon.com weekly round-up podcast, the recently-introduced audio supplement to the site's long-running round-up feature.

(You can find the podcast in MP3 format here.)

The show itself is pretty amusing - a look at mainstream technology news with the same sort of flippant wit that pervades the Silicon.com site. They take a few stabs at the Windows Vista UK launch (apparently some stores stayed open overnight to facilitate a mostly-ignored midnight launch), an event that apparently featured the ultra-palatable sounds of British band The Feeling

(I hadn't heard of them until now. A sort of Supertramp-by-way-of-Coldplay mixture so blandly agreeable that it might have actually been written for tv commercials. Their myspace page loads one audio track and two music videos simultaneously upon opening, unleashing a mind-bending onslaught of dull, dull sounds.)

This leads the show's hosts to criticize "dodgy celebrity endorsement for technology products," a trend that includes the arrival of Apple's mac-vs-PC television ads in the UK, featuring British comedians Mitchell and Webb, who are apparently also famous. (Incidentally, those ads inspired this rant)

Finally, the hosts arrive at what they deem the most egregious of these "dodgy celebrity endorsements," and the real reason for my post, an appearance by reality-blurring character and actor Mr. T in a promotional video for Hitachi Data Systems.

They play audio clips from the video during the podcast, but the video is on YouTube, and it appears to be just a few weeks old.

I say "promotional video" because at three-and-a-half minutes, it's a little long for a traditional television spot. And its story is a little dense for a simple commercial. It's probably something else.

A group of IT zombies listens as a consultant insists "virtualization belongs in the network, never in the controller."

Fortunately, the T bursts through the wall, puts a stop to the consultant's jibber jabber, declares himself "the T in IT" and explains to the zombies that intelligence in the network is for suckas. Finally, he virtualizes them in a process that involves shooting lightning from his gold chain.

Pretty magical.

Highlight: "You know, you've got a lot of mouth. And I've got a lot of fist for your mouth."

The folks in the podcast seem to think it's pretty silly, which it is, and that it's some sort of embarrassing failure, which it isn't.

Sure, high-tech marketing jargon is even more jarring when it's being barked by B.A. Baracus. But it's also a hell of a lot more engaging. This was never meant to be a slick, polished production. It's meant to be funny, and it is.

I'm not sure if there's any standard by which the clip's success can be measured, as it was probably meant for internal use. But on YouTube, it has been viewed rougly 11,000 times in two weeks. And I definitely enjoyed myself.

Tags: hitachi data systems, mr. t