（续上）
Ham, in fact, owes a lot to Schilling. Both men lived in Vancouver at the time, and after Ham sought out Schilling in November 2000, the two met at a restaurant to compare notes.
事实上，韩应感谢席林。那时他们都住在温哥华, 韩于2000年11月找到席林，两人在一家餐厅见面并比较了双方的记录。
"How much traffic do you have?" Schilling asked. An embarrassed Ham replied that he had no idea. Schilling mentioned that he was experimenting with a new service, GoTo.com, that would populate his domains with ads. Ham spent the next week figuring out how much traffic his sites were generating, and he was amazed by the initial tally: 8,000 unique visitors per day from the 375 names he owned at the time.
“你的域名有多少流量？”席林问道。韩尴尬地回答说他不知道。席林提到他正在试验一项GoTo.com的新服务，这项服务会用广告布置他的域名。在接下来的一周内，韩计算出他的网站产生的流量时，他惊讶于最初的记录：当时他拥有375个域名，每天有8000个独立访客。
"From then on," Ham says, "I knew that what I was building would be very, very valuable." He soon signed up with GoTo (which was later purchased by Yahoo). On his first day, Ham made $1,500.
“从那以后，”韩说，“我知道我所创造的将是非常有价值的。”他很快与GoTo公司签约（GoTo公司后来被雅虎购买）。第一天，韩就赚到了1500美元。
The system worked then as it does now: People don’t always use Google (Charts, Fortune 500) or Yahoo to find something on the Web; they’ll often type what they’re looking for into a browser’s address bar and add ".com."
这套停放系统当时和现在的运行方式都是一样的：人们并不总是使用谷歌或雅虎搜索引擎在网络上查找东西，他们时常会在浏览器地址栏输入他们所要查找的东西作为域名，并添加域名后缀“. com”。
It’s a practice known as "direct navigation," or type-in traffic, and millions do it. Need wedding shoes? Type in "weddingshoes.com" — a site that Ham happens to own — and you’ll land on what looks like a shoe-shopping portal, filled with links from dozens of retailers.
这就是众所周知的“直航式”或直接输入型流量，而且数百万计的人都通过这种方式查找东西。需要结婚礼鞋？直接在浏览器地址栏输入weddingshoes.com（结婚礼鞋），你将会登录到韩拥有的这个网站，上面有一个购鞋入口，里面是来自几十个零售商的链接。
Click on any one of those links, and the advertiser that placed it pays Yahoo, which in turn pays a cut to Ham. That single site, Ham says, brings in $9,100 a year. Small change, maybe, but the name cost him $8, and his annual overhead for it is about $7. Multiply that model several thousand times over, and you get a quick idea of the kind of cash machine that Ham was creating from his living room.
点击那些链接中的一个，放置链接的广告业主将会支付一定广告费用给雅虎，雅虎再支付一部分给韩。韩说那个简单的网站每年能够给他带来9100美元的收入，而域名的续费每年仅花费了他8美元，而且由于常年续费，平均每年约7美元。将这种模式复制上千次，你就可以很快想象到韩在他的客厅里创造了这台现金印钞机。
By early 2002, roughly $1 million a year was pouring into Ham’s operation, which he ran with the help of his high school friend and current partner, Colin Yu. But again he felt the tug of his conscience. He occasionally left Vancouver to do medical missionary stints, helping patients in Mexico, the Philippines, and China. He found the experience rewarding, but the development boom he saw taking off in China just reminded him of the virtual real estate boom he was leading back home.
2002年初，在韩的中学朋友和现在的合伙人科林·余的帮忙下，过去的那一年大概有100万美元进入了韩的口袋。这使得韩再一次感觉到他的良心过意不去。他有时候离开温哥华，到墨西哥、菲律宾和中国帮助病人，做医学上的传教士。 他感觉到经验是有益的，当他看见中国在飞速发展时，这使他想起他的域名——虚拟的房地产，于是就回家了。
Soon Ham was back working full-time on the Web. "There was just too much more to do," he says.
韩回来后，很快就将全部工作时间投入到网络上。他说：“有很多事情需要去做”。
A little taste
There was no looking back. The next few years were among Ham’s most aggressive. One of his most valuable tricks was one he had experimented with in the early days, a practice called domain "tasting." Tasting takes advantage of a provision that allows domain-name buyers a free five-day trial period. Intended to protect customers who mistakenly purchase the wrong name, it handed aggressive domainers another means with which to expand — and exploit — their portfolios.
一项小尝试
不再回头看以前，随后的几年，韩越来越积极进取。他最有价值的诡计之一是他在早期作的一个试验，一个叫“域名试用”的习作。“域名试用”利用了域名注册中的一个条款，该条款允许域名买家有5天的免费试用期，这是为了避免客户注册时购买了错误的域名。这对于积极进取的域名投资人来说别具意义，通过这种方式，他们可以大量扩张其投资组合。
Ham cobbled together new lists of domain words in every combination, registering hundreds of thousands of new names for free, monitoring the traffic, and then returning the duds. By 2004, Ham had amassed such a deep portfolio that he pulled his names from third-party registrars, launched his own registrar, and then created another company, appropriately named Hitfarm, that could do a better job than Yahoo of matching ads with domain names — for himself and 100 or so other domainers.
韩在每项组合里都列出了一份域名新名单，免费注册了数十万计的新域名，监测完流量后, 然后将流量少的垃圾域名删除掉。2004年，韩从第三方注册商能力收集到如此多的一份域名投资组合，以致于他自己做了家注册商, 并开了家叫Hitfarm的公司，以便为他自己和上百个其他域名投资人的域名匹配上更加合适的雅虎。
Like any shopping spree, though, Ham’s tasting binge didn’t last. It brought in so many names — offbeat strings of letters, names with too many dashes, and other variations that humans would be hard-pressed to think of — that Ham saw the quality of his portfolio dropping in proportion to its growing size. For every few thousand names he’d register, he’d toss back all but a hundred or so.
就像任何购物狂欢一样，韩的域名“试用”并没有持续太久。这种方式增加了很多域名：一串离奇字母的、带有太多连接符的、人们很难觉得变化的域名……韩发现域名的质量和注册规模的比例，每注册1000个域名，他只会留下100个左右，其余的都删除了。
The hunt for typo-squatters
Tasting exacerbated another problem too: Ham’s software grabbed all kinds of typographical variations of trademarked names. Called typo-squatting, it’s a practice now coming under the same intense scrutiny long faced by cybersquatters. Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) and Neiman Marcus are just two companies whose lawyers have brought anti-cybersquatting lawsuits, charging domainers with intentionally profiting from variations of their trademarks.
对“蓄意错拼”域名的搜寻
域名“试用”也加速了另外一个问题的出现：韩的软件抓取了商标域名的各种“蓄意错拼”变化类型，这是“蓄意错拼”域名的新领地，网络域名“蓄意错拼”者对这项新的试验带着强烈的研究愿望。微软和 Neiman Marcus公司的律师对此进行反网络域名“蓄意错拼”行为的诉讼，起诉域名投资人故意使用他们商标域名的不同“蓄意错拼”中获得利润。
"Tasting changed everything," says Ham, who has since abandoned the practice, though he concedes that Hitfarm still holds some problematic names. "I said, forget it," he says. "Generic names are already too hard to come by. And the legal risks are too great."
“域名‘试用’改变了每件事情，”韩说到。他已经弃用了域名“试用”这项试验，虽然他承认Hitfarm仍然保留着一些棘手的域名。“我说，忘记它吧，”他说。“常用域名已经很难找到，而且违法的风险性太大。”
The legal risks should diminish, however, if you don’t own the domain names at all — and that’s the secret behind the Cameroon play.
如果你不拥有域名，违法的风险性就会减少，这就是隐藏在喀麦隆诡计后面的秘密。
New world order
The domain confab in Vegas is like any other trade conference: The real intrigue happens at cocktail hour. One subject in the air is Cameroon. Late last summer, domainers began noticing that something odd happens to .cm traffic: It all winds up at a site called Agoga.com. Domainers know, of course, that .cm belongs to Cameroon. And they know that whoever controls Agoga.com has created a potential gold mine.
What they don’t know is who’s behind it all.
新的世界秩序
在拉斯维加斯，域名交流会就像其他的商贸会议一样：真正的阴谋在喝鸡尾酒时发生。会议的一项主题是喀麦隆域名。去年夏天末，域名投资人开始注意不同寻常的情况发生了：.cm域名的流量全部引向了一个叫Agoga.com的网站。当然域名投资人都知道.cm属于喀麦隆的域名后缀，而且他们知道控制 Agoga.com的人创造了一个有潜力的金矿。
他们所不知道的是，到底是谁在背后操纵。
At one of the meet-and-greets, Ham is standing drinkless, as usual, sporting a polo shirt, chatting with a few people he knows and some he’s just met. In this crowd, it seems, everyone wants to know Ham. Finally, he is alone.
在这样的交流会上，韩像往常一样穿着一件保罗衬衫，拿着饮料与一些他认识和见过的人们站着闲聊。这群人看起来，每个人都想要了解韩的手法。最后，终于只剩下了他一人。
"I hear you’re the guy behind .cm?"
Ham looks surprised by the reporter’s question, then flashes a big smile and says, "I had help."
“我听说你是在. cm域名背后操纵的那个人？”
听到记者的问题后，韩看起来很惊讶，然后脸上一个大大的笑容一闪而过，说：“我帮了些忙而已。”
Over a series of conversations a few weeks later in Vancouver, Ham shares some details about a deal that, despite his innate reticence, he’s clearly proud of. About a year ago, he says, he worked his contacts to gain connections to government officials in Cameroon. Then he flew several confidantes to Yaound? the capital, to make their pitch. His key programmer went along to handle the technical details.
随后，记者在温哥华和韩不断交流了几个星期，韩分享了有关交易的一些细节，尽管有些话他不能说，显然他对此引以为傲。他说，大约在一年前，他联络上喀麦隆的政府官员，然后他派了几个知己飞到喀麦隆的首都雅温得定居，还让他的主要程序员前去处理技术上的细节。
"Hey," Ham says, flagging his techie down near the office elevator. "Didn’t you meet with the president of Cameroon?"
“嗨”，韩向办公室电梯附近的技术人员问到，“你和喀麦隆的总统见面了吗?"
"Nah," the programmer says. "We met with the prime minister. But we did see the president’s compound."
“没有”，程序员说道，“我们只是和总理见了面，但已经和总统谈妥了。”
Typo-squatters hit banks
It’s an odd scene to picture: a domainer’s reps in a sit-down with Ephraim Inoni, the prime minister of Cameroon, to discuss the power of type-in typo traffic and pay-per-click ads. And yet, as with most of the angles Ham has played, the Cameroon scheme is ingeniously straightforward.
网络域名“蓄意错拼”遇上了银行
这是个奇怪的场景：域名投资人的代表和喀麦隆的总理意法连·埃诺尼坐在一起讨论“蓄意错拼”流量和按点击支付广告的威力。 和大部份韩当过的天使投资人角色一样，喀麦隆方案巧妙而直接。
Ham’s people installed a line of software, called a "wildcard," that reroutes traffic addressed to any .cm domain name that isn’t registered. In the case of Cameroon, a country of 18 million with just 167,000 computers connected to the Internet, that means hundreds of millions of names. Type in "paper.cm" and servers owned by Camtel, the state-owned company that runs Cameroon’s domain registry, redirect the query to Ham’s Agoga.com servers in Vancouver.
韩的手下安装了一套软件程序，叫做“字符取代”，能够变更任何未被注册的.cm域名流量导向。喀麦隆有1800万人口和16.7万台联网的计算机，这意味着有数以亿计的域名。当输入“paper.cm”（纸）时，为喀麦隆域名提供注册服务的Camtel机构所提供的服务器，会将域名重新指向位于温哥华的韩所拥有的Agoga.com网站的服务器。
The servers fill the page with ads for paper and office-supply merchants. (Officials at Yahoo confirm that the company serves ads for Ham’s .cm play.) It all happens in a flash, and since Ham doesn’t own or register the names, he’s not technically typo-squatting, according to several lawyers who handle Internet issues.
服务器在网页上布满了关于纸和办公用品供应商的广告 （雅虎方面证实公司为韩的.cm 方案提供广告）。这发生在一瞬间。处理互联网域名争议的一些律师认为，由于韩不拥有或注册这些域名，此技术上而言，他不是在搞网络“蓄意错拼”。
The method is spelled out in a patent application filed by a Vancouver businessman named Robert Seeman, who Ham says is his partner in the venture and who also serves as chief adviser at Reinvent Technology. (Seeman declined to be interviewed for this story.)
这种方法在一个温哥华商人罗伯特·西蒙的专利申请中有详细说明，韩说此人是他的风险投资合伙人，同时也担任再创技术公司的首席顾问。（对于此事，西蒙婉拒了记者的访问）。
Ham won’t reveal specifics but says Agoga receives "in the ballpark" of 8 million unique visitors per month. Fellow domainers, naturally, are envious.
韩不会说出详情，但他说Agoga在此领域每月有800万的独立访客。同为域名投资人的其他人当然相当嫉妒。
"As soon as it started happening, there was a huge sense of ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’" says attorney Berryhill, who represents Schilling and other domainers.
“当事件发生时, 让人有种很强烈的感觉是‘我为什么没有想到那样做’?”希林和其他域名投资人的经纪人百利·希尔说。
Still, several companies have already tracked down Ham’s attorneys, claiming trademark infringement. Ham argues that his system is legally in the clear because it treats every.cm typo equally and doesn’t filter out trademarked names.
悄悄的，一些公司已经追踪到韩的律师，宣称商标侵权。韩争论说，他的系统在法律上是解释得清楚的，因为该系统平等地对待每一个“蓄意错拼”的.cm域名，而且不会过滤出商标名字。
Berryhill concurs. "You can’t really say that [wildcarding] is targeting trade-marks," he says. "It captures all the traffic, not just trademark traffic." Moreover, the anti-cybersquatting statute applies only to people who register a trademarked domain; using a wildcard doesn’t require registering names.
百利·希尔对此意见相同。“你不能说‘字符取代’系统把商标域名作为目标,”他说,“它捕获的是所有的流量而不单单是商标域名的流量。”而且，反网络域名“蓄意错拼”行为的法规只适用于一个注册商标域名的人，“字符取代”系统并不需要注册域名。
Clever though it may be, .cm is "a very small part of our operations," Ham says. He won’t disclose how much he pays to the government of Cameroon, whose officials could not be reached for comment.
虽然这样做很聪明的，但是韩说，“.cm是我们方案中一个非常小的部份。”他不会透露他对喀麦隆政府支付多少费用，意见也不会传到喀麦隆政府官员那里。
The partnership has been a rocky one so far, and the system has sporadically shut down. But .cm is only one of several country domains where the typo play can work. According to Ham, he and his team are working with other governments. The dream typo play — .co — belongs to Colombia, to which Ham says Seeman paid several visits long before they began working on Cameroon. (Citing safety concerns, Ham hasn’t yet made the trip. "I would only go if the president requests to meet me," he says.)
合伙关系到现在为止还是坚如磐石，系统只会偶尔发生故障。但是 .cm是一些国家级别“蓄意错拼”域名中唯一能够运作的。韩和他的团队正在和其他的政府接洽。梦之域名“蓄意错拼”方案中包括.co域名，属于哥伦比亚。韩说，在他们对喀麦隆开始公关之前 , 西蒙就拜访了好几次哥伦比亚。（出于对安全的关心，韩还没有去过哥伦比亚。他说，“如果总统要见我的时候，我会去的。”）
As for other countries he might soon invade, Oman (.om) is an obvious target. Niger and Ethiopia are out there too, but since they would play off less lucrative .net typos, they might not be worth the trouble.
As for Colombia, Ham says, "we’re making progress."
至于他很快可能进入的其他国家，阿曼（.om）是一个明显的目标。尼日尔和埃塞俄比亚也是, 但是他们较少从.net的“蓄意错拼”域名中获利，不太可能值得他们去冒风险。
至于哥伦比亚，韩说，“我们有所进展。”
The long view
Ham leans over his office PC to check on a domain auction. Steven Sacks, a domainer based in Indianapolis who works for Ham, is telling him about some names up for sale. Ham shoots back an instant message: "I like doctordegree.com … and rockquarry.com … sunblinds.com."
长远观点
韩倾身到他办公电脑检查一项域名拍卖。以印第安纳波利斯为据点的，替韩工作的一个域名投资人史蒂文·萨克斯,，告诉他一些域名正在出售。韩回复了一个即时消息：“我喜欢doctordegree.com（博士学位）……rockquarry.com（采石场）……sunblinds.com（窗檐）。”
The days of figuring out the drop are long over. Everything’s open now. Lists are easy to obtain. You can preorder a name before it drops and hope to get it. Or, like Ham, you can shell out five or six figures in online auctions. The only great deals, at least for .com names, tend to happen privately, when a domainer manages to find an eager or naive seller.
计算域名何时删除的日子已经结束了。每件事现在都公开了。现在的目录是容易获得的。当你希望拿到一个删除的域名时，你能预订到。或者像韩一样，在线线拍卖那里，你能用上5或6个马甲。至少对.com域名来说，大型交易是趋向于私下交易的，域名投资人会设法找到这个热心或天真的卖家。
Ham still buys 30 to 100 names a day, but he’s no longer getting them on the cheap. In fact, he and Schilling, who today maintains a $20 million-a-year portfolio from his home in the Cayman Islands, are often accused of driving up prices.
每天，韩仍然买入30到100个域名，但是他不再能廉价得到了。事实上，他和现在每年域名投资组合收入2000万美元，家在开曼群岛的希林，时常被指责提升了域名价格。
Take, for example, the $26,250 Ham paid for Fruitgiftbaskets.com, or the $171,250 for Hoteldeals.com. "The amount he will pay is crazy," says Bob Martin, president of Internet REIT, a domain investment firm that has raised more than $125 million from private investors, including Maveron, the venture firm backed by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.
举例来说，韩为Fruitgiftbaskets.com（水果礼品篮）支付了26250美元的费用，为Hoteldeals.com（旅馆交易）支付了171250美元的费用。“他可以支付的金额是令人疯狂的，”Internet REIT公司的董事长鲍伯•马丁说。Internet REIT公司是一家域名投资公司，拥有超过1.25亿美元的私人投资基金，包括被星巴克咖啡连锁店的创始人霍华德•舒尔茨收购的Maveron。
Nonsense, Ham says. The names are expensive only if you value them the way people like Martin do. The VCs and bankers, who were late to the domain gold rush, assess names by calculating the pay-per-click ad revenue and attaching a multiple based on how long it would take to pay off the investment.
韩说：“一切毫无意义”。域名才是昂贵的只有当你评估了它的价值，这就是人们想要像风险投资家和银行家马丁所做的方式。马丁是域名淘金潮的迟到者，借助计算每次点击支付广告的收入和需要花多久时间收回投资来评估域名。
Viewed that way, Ham’s personal portfolio alone is worth roughly $300 million. But some of Ham’s recent domain purchases would also look silly: They’d take 15 or 20 years just to justify the price, and that assumes continuation of the pay-per-click model.
那样看来，韩的个人域名投资组合大概价值3亿美元。但是韩最近的一些购买域名的行为也许看起来会很愚蠢: 他们会拿 15或20 年的收益来替价格辩护，同时假设每次点击支付模式会持续下去。
How to scale Mt. Google
But Ham is taking a longer view. The Web, he says, is becoming cluttered with parked pages. The model is amazingly efficient — lots of money for little work –but Ham argues that Internet users will soon grow weary of it all.
该如何依比例决定Mt. Google
但是韩卓有远见。他认为网络开始被停放页面弄得混乱，模式有着令人惊异的效率，少量工作就能带来许多钱，但是韩同时说互联网的使用者很快将会对此感到疲倦。
He also expects Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to find ways to effectively combat typo-squatting. Some browsers can already fix typos; Internet Explorer catches unregistered domains and redirects visitors to a Microsoft page — in effect controlling traffic the same way that Ham is doing with .cm. "The heat is rising," Ham says.
他也期待谷歌、微软和雅虎找到有效方法与“蓄意错拼”作斗争。一些浏览器能已经能够修正“蓄意错拼”；IE浏览器捕捉到未注册域名时，会重新将访客导向一个微软页面。韩正在用相同的方法有效控制.cm的流量。韩说：“热度正在上升”。
When Ham buys a domain now, he’s not doing pay-per-click math but rather sizing it up as a potential business. Reinvent Technology aims to turn his most valuable names into mini media companies, based on hundreds of niche categories.
当韩现在购买一个域名时，他不再通过计算每次点击支付，而是当作一项有潜力的生意。再创技术公司打算将他的最有价值的域名，根据数以百计适当的类别包装成为迷你媒体公司。
Among the first he’d like to launch, not surprisingly, is Religion.com. Ham recently leased the entire 27th floor in his Vancouver building and is now hiring more than 150 designers, engineers, salespeople, and editorial folks.
不要惊讶，他最想要上线的网站是Religion.com（宗教）。 韩最近在温哥华一栋建筑物里租下整个27 楼，现在雇请了超过 150 名设计师、工程师、销售商和编辑。
Much of that effort is going into developing search tools based more on meaning and less on keywords. "Google is only so useful," Ham says.
大部分努力花在发展搜索引擎工具上，以便更多基于含义而并非关键词。韩说：“谷歌只有这样才更加有用”。
The aim is to apply a meaning-based, or "semantic," system across swaths of sites, luring customers from direct navigation and search engines alike. Religion.com would then become an anchor to which scores of other sites would be tied.
目标是建立词义应用, 或“与语义有关的”。系统通过网站留下的足迹，引导来自“直航式”输入的客户和搜寻引擎。 Religion.com（宗教）会被大量的其他网站关联上。
"It’s time to build out the virtual real estate," Ham says. "There’s so much more value in these names than pay-per-click." Seeman’s patent application even mentions the possibility of turning Web traffic from Cameroon and other future foreign partners into full-fledged portals.
“现在是增加虚拟房地产的时候，”韩说，“在这些域名有着比每次点击支付更多的价值。”西蒙的专利申请甚至提到将从喀麦隆和其他的未来国外合伙人来的网络流量导入成熟站点入口的可能性。
It’s all part of the master plan, as Ham aims to become the first domainer to move from the ranks of at-home name hunter to Internet titan. Smaller players have been selling out to VC-backed groups, and Ham expects that the best names will eventually be owned by just a handful of companies.
这就是域名大师的全盘计划，韩打算通过从居家域名猎头到互联网巨头的转变，成长为第一域名投资人。小的域名玩家已经被出售给风险投资集团，韩期望最好的域名最后将被少数公司拥有。
If he bets right, he might very well be one of them. "If you control all the domains," he says, "then you control the Internet."
如果他赌赢了, 他可能会成为他们当中的一员。“如果你控制所有的域名，”他说，“那么你就控制了互联网。”
（完）
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