Our Geo-generic dot com auctions are going to be different than the standard online domain auction. You can understand why a site attempting to auction 1000’s of domains every day needs to have an automated bidding system but why does Bido.com, who only auction one name per day, have an automated bidding system? Probably at least one of the people running the site is going to be monitoring the site during the auction, I would be very surprised if there weren’t three people there glued to the screen during that one hour. You would think it would be easier to have a live auctioneer.

There are very likely some decent reasons to have a computer program keeping track of the bidding and why a human can’t but we can’t think of any. Therefore we are aiming at providing a live auctioneer for our auctions. It isn’t as if there haven’t been live auctions online before - one of the first applications of the Flash Media Server used for a major commercial purpose was a cattle auction. There were millions of dollars spent and that seemed to go alright for them. This was 6 or more years ago, surely it can be done again and on a smaller scale.

Without thinking too much about it until we investigate a little more our decision is to make a live auction. I would think an audio-video feed. The question will be how many bidders we can attract. To begin with we are anticipating less than 100, in fact if our first auction had 100 viewers who were able to bid we would consider it a resounding success. Regardless, we will anticipate that between 0 and 100 users will potentially have to be accommodated before we have to increase the amount of bandwidth and connections that we lease.

Our thinking is that it could be fun and even potentially informative to the bidding audience. If the auction lasts for one hour it would open up a lot of time for the auctioneer to educate the bidders on potential uses, even to exchange comments with the bidders. Now, one hour may be too much time - at a real auction a long bidding exchange might be over within 5 minutes, easily. It may be that less time is better but you also have to account for people not necessarily being able to stick around for the whole auction, or who can only show up for a few minutes.

Of course these are not problems, more concerns - but the object is going to be to make it as interesting as possible, as far removed from the dullness of watching some numbers on a screen changing every now and then. We’d play Keno if that sort of thing thrilled us (it doesn’t and we don’t).

So those are our first thoughts/decisions about the nuts and bolts of our auctions. We will research that and go from there - all documented in the next post.