Or did you mean .mobii ?

Ajit Jaokar's got a great blog, but I never seem to get my comments to his posts approved (whole articles, no problem though!)

In particular, I take small issue with this one. The insinuation is not veiled enough for me to resist responding to.

I have to say that relaxing on my sofa using Opera on a Wii is a pretty similar experience to relaxing on my sofa using IE7 on a media PC. So yup: no point in having a .wii top level domain (or .console, or .couch or whatever).

But walking down a street in a strange city in the rain, looking for somewhere you can can get a taxi home safely? Sounds like a totally different context to me. One that .mobi serves well (for example in the form of http://cabbies.mobi/)

Yes, that's right. Top-level extensions are about context, not the way markup is rendered. (The latter is something that browser manufacturers rightly obsess about).

So here are my two thought experiments I always keep in mind...

a) You're walking down a street. You (somehow) have a full-blown version of Firefox on your mobile phone. You need to access some pertinent information urgently on it, and know the relevant publisher runs both a .mobi and a .com site. Which would you enter into your phone's address bar?

b) Opera develops a client-side language translator for their browser. It can turn English web sites into French. You're in France. Do you access ebay.fr or ebay.co.uk?

Hopefully the former in both cases: .fr is about the French context, not French markup. And .mobi is about the mobile context, not mobile markup.

(Although dotMobi still has a role to play with the markup too, because not every phone is yet blessed with Mr Jon von Tetzchner's rendering magic)

Bottom line... It's all about the context, baby.

Comments

[Paul Walsh]

Personally, I don't believe in moderating blog posts unless it's for serious SPAM reasons.

[Joe]

i just think that automatic redirection can be a good thing for dotmobi mobile internet.

[Visible.Mobi]

dotTEL is going to be rolled out in next few weeks (more info at nic.tel). It seems like its going to be in direct competition with dotMOBI. Is this true or are there some "key" differences ?

[James Pearce]

dotTel is covered by Alexa here:

http://dotmobi.typepad.com/dotmobi/2007/03/tel_and_mobi_le.html

Does that answer your questions?

[Visible.Mobi]

Yes it does. Thanks.

I have one doubt though, what would prevent them from making it a domain extension for mobile web (similar to dot mobi) ?

[shoe stretchers]

If you were going to buy a golf club, you wouldn't walk into a store and buy the first one you see, would you? Of course

not; especially if you want to improve your golf game! You'll want to hold the club, take some practice swings, hit some

balls if the store has a practice spot, and look at the price, of course. If you are considering buying running shoes,

you need to go through a similar process and take the time to find the perfect shoe.