On a personal note, I want to thank everyone in the domainer community for honoring me with the Domainer of the Year and the Domain Hall of Fame Awards.

I’m quite humbled by your support and greatly appreciate the honor.  I was actually shocked to win, so surprised that I could barely put two words together, but at least I got to thank my Wife Judi who has been by my side for 22 years, and Adam Matuzich who has been on my other side for 8 years.

My induction to the Domain Hall of Fame was made even more special by being joined by Michael and David Castello, two individuals whom I greatly admire not just as domainers and businessmen, but as being highly intelligent, genuinely wonderful people.

My thanks especially go out to Rick Schwartz and Howard Neu and who created the TRAFFIC show and began the awards to honor those in the industry.  Without Rick, Howard and their spouses, Alina and Barbara, we would not be an industry but just a bunch of people with a bunch of domains.

It was also very rewarding to see Ron Jackson pick up the first domineer blog/news award site.  Ron has been reporting on the industry for years, and has been widely quoted in major media sources. A first class guy,  and a great representative for the industry, it was great to see Ron win the first award.

I think all domainers dreams came true when the buyers of a category killer, multimillion dollar domain, Candy.com took the stage and thanked Rick Schwartz for selling them the domain name and making them a force in their industry overnight.

The buyers of Candy.com, will help end users understand the importance of great domains more than 100 domainers could ever have.  The buyers of Candy.com may well go down in history as one of the best advocates the domain industry ever had.

Another dream of mine came true at the TRAFFIC, which may lead for great things for the entire industry.

For years I have been dreaming about the chance of sitting down with someone at Microsoft and talking about domains.

I wrote a post back in May 2008, on how Microsoft could benefit by spending, what for them is relatively pocket change, and take out the top 20 privately owned domain portfolios, and a few publicly owned companies that have vast domain holdings, permanently picking up 5% or more of additional search engine market share for themselves and taking that traffic away from their competitors, Google and Yahoo.

So in the limo going to the fantastic TRAFFIC party that Skenzo threw, I found myself and my wife Judi sitting next to of all people, a Senior Business Development Manager for Microsoft, and for the 30 minute trip from the Brooklyn Marriott to the mid-town Manhattan nightclub, I made the pitch I’ve been dreaming about making for years, telling Microsoft why they should buy domains.

We had a great conversation and I have already had follow up contact via e-mail from the gentleman from Microsoft.

Will Microsoft realize how domains can make increase there market share overnight, maybe.

I sure know one thing, if we can get any one of the search engines to understand that it makes more sense for them to own the traffic rather than rent the traffic, as they currently do, all of the search engines will follow suit.

If we can get one search company to understand that it would be a much smarter expenditure of funds to buy domains and gain permanent market share, than spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get users to switch from one search engine than the other, all domainers with quality domains would be big winners.

So were else than at a TRAFFIC show could you meet and have a chance to have a serious one on one chat on the industry with a giant in the Internet world.  Just that 30-minute conversation was well worth the cost of admission and attending the event.

It could be a game changer for the industry.

TRAFFIC New York, where dreams came true.