Subject: Solicitation for a discussion on Keyword-based addressing

From: "zhangguoqiang" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 11:16:36 +0800

Keyword service is thriving in non-english speaking countries these days, e.g, Netpia and digitalnames in Korea, CNNIC in China, JWORD in Japan. Even in U.S, there were realnames and netword. It proves to be a useful application both to end users and to advertisers.

However, the current keyword service each has its own solution, and lacks of coordination. For example, when a korean comes to China, then without plugin, he will unable to access the Korea keyword service. 

When talking about keyword, most people will question its relationship with search engines and IDN. So, let me first clarify it here. Different from search engines, keyword-based addressing is an addressing technology. Based on whether a keyword is registered or not, the resolution result is determinstic for any given keyword, while the search for a keyword in a search engine is undetermistic, strongly depending on the search engine used and the exact time the search carried out.  Several features have made keyword-based addressing distinct from IDN. First, keyword maps to URL, which means it can be used to directly access a particular webpage, while IDN is used to access a web site. Second, keyword eases user's experience by eliminating the need to remember potentially great number of suffixes. This feature also provides a better way for advertisers to protect their brand names. Finally, orginating from the western countries, domain names inherit the input conventions from w
 est countries, e.g, put the most 
signicant part into the rightmost, while our proposed keyword-based addressing can respect different input conventions.     

Surely, keyword-based addressing is not intended to replace IDN, search engine or URI. It is only a complenmentary technology. There are some usage scenarios where the keyword-based addressing is more effective than other techniques. For example, if you are a blogger of a portal blog website, typically, you are assigned a URL that identifies your blog. It is usually composed of two parts: a domain name and an ID(typically a magic number). So how can you advertise your blog to your friends? Use search engines? No, because your blog is not so popular. Use URL? It is too hard for people to remember. In this scenario, keyword-based addressing provides an effective way to access your blog, e.g. yahooblog:bob. 

So, we think keyword-based addressing is a very useful technique, especially for non-english speaking countries. Even for english speaking countries, the above example also illustrates its practicability. To internationalize this service and provide cross resolution capability, we highly recommend a standard being developped. 

Our keyword-based addressing draft is available at http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zhang-keyword-ddds-00, which specifies keyword-based addressing as a DDDS application. 

In summary, our keyword addressing has the following advantages:
(1) simple syntax
(2) allows for global resolution
(3) repects cultural input conventions, the customized rules stored in DDDS database is responsible for the keyword-to-domanname tranlation.
(4) can be used for different applications

So, my solicitation is for a discussion of this draft or the keyword service itself. To my opinion, application area is the right place for this discussion. 

2009-04-01 

zhangguoqiang