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Mayo.tel is the mobile phone network of directories for County Mayo, Ireland, linking Mayo businesses, local organisations and communities to the mobile web.

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It is still early days for Mayo.tel as we continue to build and enhance the service.
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Email if you would like your business or organisation listed for free in one of the local directories.
Mayo.tel - linking Mayo to the mobile web.
Related Sites

• Tel Ireland
• Telnic
• MayoDotTel

Dot Tel Domains - New Display Features

By Bill Rutherfurd

The new Dot Tel Domain display is a significant change for this top level extension. The new display will be released in March, 2010. I am somewhat positive about the new display design. However, it seems to have drawn its inspiration from Tax Department forms; especially those of New Zealand, a country South-East of Australia.

Telnic is the promoter of Dot Tel. Their timing with the new design is excellent. It was no doubt planned for the month before the domain's first year renewals which are due on 24th March, 2010. The display changes are dramatic, and welcomed. They are the shot in the arm that this internet top level domain extension needed. I mean, who got any pleasure out of showing anyone their Dot Tel with the current display?

Colour customisation will be offered through a series of templates. I do not know the details yet of those templates. The components of the design appear to be square, whereas the old design was curved. I liked the shape of the previous design. It was the drab colour scheme that was the problem. I am ambivalent on colour customisation because I do not know if it will detract from the Dot Tel brand. I favour just one template with a fantastic design to keep the brand strong and recognisable.

Strong and colourful borders are better. Although colours increase the data amount per page, data costs are falling. Perhaps in time, as data costs drop the display will evolve into something that people really love to see.

The Tel logo will be moved to the bottom of the page. This is a shame because it completed the text header for the current web site page. The current design also put the logo right in the user's face when they pulled up the page. It now has a semi-tube or lens-like design. I preferred the previous Tel logo for its simplicity and I think that the change was not required. It will also affect brand recognition as it will sit below the fold of the page on many computers and mobile phones. Perhaps, the logo position will be adjustable.

The VCard is now at the top right of the page. This an improvement because it makes this important feature more accessible, or noticeable than when it was at the bottom right of the page.

Custom icons have been allowed for popular web sites such as LinkedIn, and Facebook. This is an improvement because well known and colourful symbols can now be placed on a Dot Tel page making the page more exciting. The previous display lacked this excitement factor.

The placing of well-known icons on the page improves the perceived quality of that page because they are some of the best known symbols in the world. They give a web page status whether that status is deserved or not. This is a major improvement which adds value to all Dot Tel Domains. There are also new contact type icons.

One thing missing from the new display is the breadcrumb trail that is on the current display. Studies of usability indicate that the breadcrumb is an indispensable part of a web page. I hope this is an error because it is a significant mistake to remove it. It could be at the very top left of the page on the same line as the new management tools. I hope they do not leave it out!

There are two new features which are critical. One is absolutely necessary and that is a way to search the current Dot Tel or all Dot Tels. Top marks here! The other addition is the top-of-the-page management and login functions. If I am not mistaken, this means that the previously roundabout route to managing a domain is gone. Excellent stuff and in the correct position, as is the search box.

Telnic are also introducing Google AdSense on Dot Tels which will be greatly appreciated by owners. It will provide another income stream for Dot Tel owners, and add credibility to the domain extension. Hopefully, it will not involve any third party applications. This is another step in the right direction.

Telnic at long last have done some things right. There are still things to improve. After being available to the public for nearly a year, there are at last grounds for cautious optimism about the future of Dot Tel.

Bill Rutherfurd is an early Dot Tel adopter. He likes the fast access to contact data and information especially on mobile phones. It is also a very cheap web presence. To visit his Lake Taupo Region of New Zealand Dot Tel directory please use the link at http://www.squidoo.com/Taupodottel. He also has a dottel blog at http://www.dottel.blogspot.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bill_Rutherfurd

.TEL demo at Macworld from Name.com on Vimeo.

how to setup google apps with a telnic domain

https://sites.google.com/a/haussmann.tel/how-to-setup-google-apps-with-a-telnic-domain/

Créer son domaine .tel en 10 étapes

View more documents from ToutPointTel.

Increase Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - .Tel content is fully structured and published on the domain name server (DNS) rather than the World Wide Web. That makes it easily read and indexed by search engine crawlers, strengthening your presence in search results. This important SEO tool can help drive traffic to your Web site and may result in increased sales.

The technology behind .tel allows for the data to load much quicker than other domains including .com making it ideal for pocket internet surfing devices. This will become industry standard and has been commissioned with the future growth of the internet in mind. This project has undertaken nine years of development before being launched.

The .tel system is DNS-based, any.tel takes just a fraction of a second to load, and is much quicker than loading a typical website.

A .tel directory directs customer to the department of location of their choice using a quick and intuitive navigation structure based on innovative DNS technology.

According to Telnic, the creators of .tel it is the biggest creation after .com because of the way data is going to be handled, traditionally if you had a domain name, you could create a website around it, but with .tel you can't do that. Well what is the use of a domain around which you cant design your website?
That is the beauty of it, instead of hosting a site, it stores all the information on the Internet backbone itself. So whenever you type www.henri.tel you get data which is not hosted by any server but is contained in the domain name server itself. How can they do this? They have done this by utilizing the NAPTR, TXT & LOC records on the DNS itself. Its a simple and a brilliant solution.

How is it done?

Name Authority Pointer (NAPTR) is the protagonist of our story, after proving its robustness in implementation of VoIP phone calls (when your phone call is routed over the Internet with the help of the protocol ENUM) its back to help us with the implementation of .tel technology. NAPTR allows the publication and management of your business card and ways for us to distinguish between them. That's not the end of what NAPTR can do, it can also allow you to manage different instant messaging and VoIP identities like of Skype, AIM and GTalk. Also updating these records dynamically is possible which allows us to make innumerable changes (at no cost!).
TXT records or the Text Records are the human readable format which is stored in ASCII format and the LOC record allows the user to allow somebody to pinpoint his/her exact location.

The most interesting (and useful) difference between .tel and other gTLD's (generic top-level domains) is in the DNS. From the Telnic FAQ, "...the value of a .tel domain lies with the ability to host personal (or corporate) contact information directly in the DNS, which can then be universally accessible. This stands in contrast to the typical use of the DNS for other TLDs, in which the DNS only provides a mapping between domain names and IP addresses."

1 - Why This is Useful

Storing contact information in the DNS enables developers to write code which can query these custom .tel DNS records to gather and store information about you, your connections, family, or friends. For example, instead of managing a set of virtual business cards, software can simply map an individual or business to a .tel domain. When a user needs to look-up the email address or phone number of an individual or business, the software can simply run a DNS query against a .tel to retrieve the latest contact information. For example, if all of my friends know that my .tel domain is kolich.tel, their digital Rolodexes can stay current by querying kolich.tel. If my email address changes, I only have to update my .tel information in once place, instead of pinging each friend individually to alert them of the change.


2 - Getting Started

When you purchase a .tel domain from a registrar, like Network Solutions, the registrar will create an account for you on their .tel information management portal. This portal is used to manage the contact information available through your .tel domain. Here's a screen shot of my kolich.tel management control panel from Network Solutions. Note that no knowledge or understanding of DNS is required to own or maintain a .tel domain. All you need to do is login, determine what information you want to share, and your registrar and Telnic will do the rest.


3 - How It Works

Be warned, you cannot host your own web-site under a .tel domain. However, you can add custom MX records to your .tel which allow you to redirect email from your .tel to your service provider of choice. From the record types page on telnic.org, "...compared to traditional top-level domains, the .tel DNS uses a different set of record types. User-specified Address and CNAME records are prohibited, and the following are allowed:

* TXT - text record for storing keywords and other freeform text.
* LOC - location records containing latitude, longitude and altitude data.
* NAPTR (Naming Authority Pointer Record) - a record holding a URL and an Enumservice that indicates the type of URL information, such as email or phone number."

In other words, the contact information you provided through your registrars .tel control panel is embedded inside of these DNS records. This is the true power of a .tel domain.

I wanted to prove to myself that this really does work, so I used dig to verify that my own .tel information is correct. Here's an example of using dig to query my kolich.tel NAPTR record against OpenDNS:

(web@skull)/> dig @208.67.222.222 kolich.tel NAPTR

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4-P1 <<>> @208.67.222.222 kolich.tel NAPTR
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 58782 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;kolich.tel. IN NAPTR ;; ANSWER SECTION: kolich.tel. 53 IN NAPTR 100 102 "u" \ "E2U+web:http+x-lbl:Twitter" "!^.*$!http://twitter.com/markkolich!" . kolich.tel. 53 IN NAPTR 100 103 "u" \ "E2U+web:http+x-lbl:LinkedIn" "!^.*$!http://www.linkedin.com/in/markkolich!" . kolich.tel. 53 IN NAPTR 100 100 "u" \ "E2U+web:http+x-lbl:Blog" "!^.*$!http://www.kolich.com!" . ;; Query time: 15 msec ;; SERVER: 208.67.222.222#53(208.67.222.222) ;; WHEN: Sun May 3 23:06:09 2009 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 275 Sure enough, my kolich.tel NAPTR record corresponds to the information found at http://kolich.tel. Now, let's verify my TXT record: (web@skull)/> dig @208.67.222.222 kolich.tel TXT

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4-P1 <<>> @208.67.222.222 kolich.tel TXT
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 53864
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;kolich.tel. IN TXT

;; ANSWER SECTION:
kolich.tel. 60 IN TXT \
".tsm" "1" "pddx" "1"
kolich.tel. 60 IN TXT \
"Mark S. Kolich\010Engineer, Entrepreneur, Consultant"
kolich.tel. 60 IN TXT \
".tkw" "1" "nl" "" "fn" "Mark" "ln" "Kolich"

;; Query time: 18 msec
;; SERVER: 208.67.222.222#53(208.67.222.222)
;; WHEN: Sun May 3 23:11:28 2009
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 157


Yep, no surprise, my TXT record also matches the information I shared on http://kolich.tel.


4 - Conclusion

In general, I'm quite impressed with the .tel concept. It's clearly an innovative and unique way to let folks stay in touch with one another using some relatively unexplored features of DNS. For the most part, I'd describe .tel as a cross between a typical DNS and WHOIS query. Unfortunately, .tel won't be as useful as I'd like until more users and software platforms adopt it as an information-sharing standard. Given the abundance of free social networking services, it may be hard to convince most users to pay an annual fee to keep their contact information online. However, if a large online player like Google begins to adopt .tel as a standard in many of its services, .tel domains could become valuable and useful tools. Until then, see you at kolich.tel.


5 - Further Reading

* Telnic Developers FAQ
* .tel on Wikipedia
* From Network Solutions, how do I get started using my .tel domain?
* The .tel Privacy Model
* The Telnic homepage
* I'm a fan of .tel, just skeptical of its chances of success