The Conversation Marketing blog has discovered that Pickering Institute is allowing anonymous users to register for-profit blogs on their .edu domain. This would allow any potential blogger to take advantage of the trust and goodwill created by real institutions.
The article does a great job of outlining the reasons why this is a bad idea, and how it could affect the SEO, value, and success of our legitimate operations.
As a higher ed professional, I agree with the author (Ian Lurie). There is a higher purpose attributed to .edu domain name. By allowing non-institutions to take advantage of the domain, it reduces taints the water. I would support a solution to fix these loopholes.
Pickering Institute doesn't visually appear to be a reputable institution, but it did grab hold of a .edu domain and is now exploiting the loopholes.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Loopholes in the .edu Domain Exploited
Posted by Seth Meranda at 8:23 AM
Tags: blog, information
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4 thoughts:
Seth, the article that you are referring to has made the front page of Sphinn with 40 sphinns and it was only posted 17 hours ago... Looks like the hounds are already on the prowl. Luckily the discussion all seems to be pretty supportive towards Education sites keeping their credibility.
Here's the link.
http://sphinn.com/story/40843
I think it all points to Bob Keller --
http://www.wowzzagreen.com/
I think Robert Keller is behind PI.EDU. He's already taken down a profile at wowzza.com, but Google has it here:
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:Ol07Pkl76ucJ:www.wowzza.com/wowzzaedu/+%22pickering+institute%22+keller&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us
or
http://tinyurl.com/4kymnq
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