PCWorld (and every other IDG service) ran this Robert McMillan article yesterday, “VMware Security Chief Leaves to Run OpenDNS,” announcing Nand Mulchandani as the new CEO. David Ulevitch, the founder, takes on the CTO role…which he pretty much filled already. I’m curious to see how the company continues to evolve.

(Just in case good karma wasn’t enough.)

I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles.
(Pulled from IMDB)

Metacritic score of 85 for “universal acclaim”…I’m glad I’m in the universe.

Amusing side note: the official studio site was blocked by OpenDNS’s adult site blocking feature. Having seen the R-movie, I guess I’m not surprised, but it never occurred to me until I got the block page. Here at home, I just unblocked the “nudity” category, though, to view the site. You can check a site’s category for yourself with this domain checking tool. This new OpenDNS benefit we rolled out two weeks ago with St. Bernard has been very popular and very educational.

We’ve worked hard to make shortcuts come alive.

The power of DNS just got a lot easier to explain. Sure, you don’t need to care about DNS itself, but shortcuts are something you can see, something you can use…almost something you can touch. After improving life behind the scenes for months, OpenDNS can now demonstrate another way the Internet experience can improve. That’s fun.

Back yet?

Good. Now compare the dancing banana to Snappy, the dancing logo of the original Snap.com, shared here. (Thanks to David, Snappy loops continually now.)

This is before Snap became NBC Internet (NBCi), before the company went defunct, and before the Idealab folks bought the easy-to-remember domain name and relaunched a search site. We’re talking 1997-1998.

I am not nostalgic for all of the dot-boom era, but Snappy always made me smile. Here is a less animated, less yellow version of the original site logo:

As in October, with PhishTank, the segment was about two minutes long, and it was the teaser going into commerical about two-thirds of the way through the show. Here’s the OpenDNS blog post about the segment.

My sister thinks I’m getting better on camera now because of the iSighting we do to keep in touch. Charitable of her… but I enjoyed doing it. Here’s a direct link to the video.

Oh, and it’s better to wear blue or any stronger color if you’re going to be on camera… which I knew, but didn’t pursue. Now I see why it’s worth making an extra effort: too washed out.

The button has two states: one for OpenDNS users, one for those yet to become OpenDNS customers. This is one of the “fun with DNS” hacks we can pull off. And, yes, fun and DNS can go in the same sentence.

Go ahead and get your own. Aaron will announce more publicly very, very soon.

Oh, and for those of you who haven’t visited in a while, yes, it’s a new theme on clock.

Motley Fool is the best-known example that comes to mind. However, Kim Komando is another online media entrepreneur from the early 1990s who still has a notable audience, both online and in other media. Her biggest asset, beyond her newsletters, is her weekly radio show…which is also a Fool characteristic. I don’t know radio that well, but I’ve seen a lot of folks who come from radio really thrive online, and vice versa. (Podcast, anyone?) Not sure why that is, but speculation for another time.

How do I know Komando still has an audience that matters?

Yesterday, January 20, 2007, OpenDNS was named the Komando Cool Site of the Day, with the headline “A safer way to access Web sites.” The writeup gives a basic, brief intro to DNS, and goes on to recommend OpenDNS with these words:

OpenDNS provides improvements over other DNS servers. It offers protection against phishing attacks. Plus, it will correct spelling mistakes you make when typing addresses.

Cool Site of the Day sounds very 1997, but we saw a notable surge of visitors to the website yesterday. Right on!

We saw a corresponding rise in support requests, too. Because of the size of Komando’s audience, and her early & heavy exposure on AOL, there are several newsletter subscribers still on AOL and other dial-up providers. That highlights our need to keep explaining DNS, and why a better DNS matters, even as we focus on features for the tech-savvy. Our business can grow nicely with both audiences, fortunately.

This is also a reminder to me that delivery matters. Yes, I’m an RSS fiend, but I didn’t give up email newsletters. All those who have yet to adopt RSS are still reading email newsletters regularly, even in a world where inboxes are never empty and spam/phish/junk are a fact of life. A trusted newsletter is a tremendous asset. Keep your content and frequency below the annoyance threshold, and it’s easier to delete the ones you don’t want than to unsubscribe.

But if it’s so simple, how come no one has done it before?

I moved DNS for this domain, pencoyd.com, back in November 2004. I’m hardly alone in having warned people ahead of time, and then being relieved when the changes were propogated (or propogating).

I know I would have jumped to use this kind of tool, even though I did lower my TTL setting before making the switch. If you have the chance, wouldn’t you want your website to be visible as close as 100% of the time to as close to 100% of the Internet as possible?

OpenDNS does not equal the Internet as a whole. Not even close. But maybe we can start something here?