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One thing about Tucows is that we don't generate press like a lot of the players in our space so we sometimes end up appearing out of the shadows when an article's written about us. Being primarily wholesale focused is one of the reasons and favoring cows over beautiful scantily clad women in our advertising is probably the other. Either way there've been a couple of stories the last few days I thought I'd share, and although unrelated both contain very important messages I feel everyone should be aware of.

The first is an article written by our very own Ross Rader who's Tucows Director of Research & Innovation as well as a very active participant in the ICANN policy space. I won't even comment on the article since I want everyone to go and read it directly, but other than Kudos on an absolutely brilliant piece that eloquently articulates concerns regarding the ICANN - Verisign .COM Registry relationship that everyone should be paying great attention to, I'll have to ask Ross where they found that picture since it definitely doesn't do him any justice

The second article is one on Tucows in the National Post today that covers everything from the high profile addition of Mark Cuban as an investor, analyst reviews, the fact we started trading on the TSX, and even comments on our offerings including one service in particular that for some pretty obvious reasons I hold a little more dear than some of the rest.. 

… is bullish about the company's prospects because of its blogging service called Blogware.

“Blogging has taken the world by storm but the big challenge from a business perspective is how you make money off it,” Mr. Shore said.

“We think Tucows might have come up with a way to make money from the growth of blogs by providing blog capabilities to service provider partners who bundle it or sell it to customers. To participate in one of the top three hot trends in the Internet and make money off it is a good thing.”

I've been hearing a lot of feedback lately that people don't know how to make money out of blogging yet. I may be way too entrenched in the industry but I don't necessarily understand where the disconnect is… that's like someone saying they don't know how to make money out of Web Hosting. Like the hosting industry of days gone by, there'll be a surge of free to fee Blog users as market demand matures so the opportunity to capitalize on this vertical as a fee based recurring revenue service is tremendous and should be the first model to consider when wanting to get into this space.

Although this trend has already manifested itself in the public growth of some of the fee based players out there, I feel that our retail partners are in an amazing position to take advantage of this surge through the relationships they've developed with their customers from their core offerings. The relationships we've built with them (Our wholesale customers) is a testament to the success and viability of what I feel is one of the most powerful distribution models online, and one that definitely benefits all of our services let alone Blogware alone.

Elliot Noss, CEO, says his company doesn't get enough credit for being the world's fourth-largest Web site domain name registrar.

Although I feel the same could be said around every service we offer today, the proof's in the pudding and like any sleeper hit I'm sure that recognition will eventually manifest all on its own.

Although an athlete rarely receives any notoriety for coming in third or fourth place in the 100 meter, they will if they also appear in the top four of the 400 meter, 1000 meter, Long Jump, High Jump, Pole Vault, Decathlon, Marathon, Discuss, Heptathlon, Javelin…