More than 260 visitors attended the fifth Serbian Internet Domain Day Conference (DIDS), organised by the Serbian National Register of Internet Domain Names (RNIDS) on 10th March 2014 at the Metropol Hotel.
DIDS is a conference that is held annually, focused on the development of the Internet globally and in the Serbian .RS and .СРБ domain spaces. This year the slogan was Domainisation, Socialisation, Good Location. The all-day program saw IT professionals from all sectors of the economy, Internet providers and accredited registrars come together with other local Internet users to hear the experiences of some twenty conference speakers from home and abroad.
The first conference block was dedicated to current global Internet trends. The Domainisation catchword referred to the introduction of more than 1000 new generic Internet domains (gTLDs), in multiple languages and scripts: .web, .caйt, .移动, . شبكة, .events, .works, .cool, .vision, .today, .company, .shop, .trend, .place, .guru, .blog, .sex and many others.
After Danko Jevtović, the Director of RNIDS gave introductory speech, the panel discussion on how new gTLDs will impact the market and what changes their introduction will bring has started. Michele Neylon, CEO of "Blacknight Internet Solutions", Ulrich Retzlaff, Director of Channel Management at the "Public Interest Registry .ORG", and Slobodan Marković, ICT Policies and Internet Community Relations Advisor at RNIDS concluded that the new generic domains are offering much greater choice to the public. How they will be used will depend primarily on the needs of users – on the content they plan to publish on their sites and whether they are targeting their national market or a global one.
The participants concluded that national TLDs are still the best choice for the national market, while generic domains are better used for sites addressing a global market, or some geographically non-specific market segment (e.g. using domains such as .events, .shop, .blog). There was also speculation as to how the new generic domains would be ranked in the Google results, since the search engine currently localises searches, giving ranking advantages to sites hosted on national domains. Vladimir Radunović, e-diplomacy educational and training programmes coordinator at the DiploFoundation moderated this panel which can be watched here.
In the second block called Socialisation, Nikolina Ljepava the director of development at the Ninamedia Agency, Radomir Basta CEO and lead SEO at the inbound marketing agency "Four Dots", Marija Petrović bloger and a photographer at the online food magazine ”Mezze.rs", and Martina Anđelković online community manager at the "Vibe Network" discussed the issues of promotion trough social networks and how it can boost web site visibility and brand recognition.
Additional topics were human behaviour on social networks, examples of best practice and ways to create a successful profile (how and when to publish posts, how to communicate directly with the community and etc). Ivana Ćirković the founder and the editor of the women’s portal www.organvlasti.com moderated this block.
The topic of the third block called Good Location were succesfull examples of Serbian websites. In the session "The .СРБ Domain - Two Years Latter" our famous linguist Vlado Đukanović spoke about different interesting Internet locations on the cyrillic .СРБ domain. After this media websites such are: www.021.rs, www.prva.rs and www.posmatrac.rs were presented. The Internet communities that also drove public attention were: www.gdenapivo.rs, www.blogmagazin.rs, www.mozilla.rs, www.clubbing.rs and www.startit.rs. The Serbian online shops such are www.avmarket.rs, www.beomob.rs, www.biospajz.rs and www.winwin.rs were also presented. Ivan Minić, the founder and the director of the "Burek.com" forum moderated the third panel.
You can read more detailed descriptions of the discussions and topics in articles written by the official bloggers of DIDS 2014 (Serbian only):
„Dan internet domena Srbije DIDS 2014“ by Vladimir Stanković - @DedaBor
„DIDS 2014: Šta donosi liberalizacija domena?“ by Una Zabunov - @unaunpaso
„Domenizacija, društvenizacija…" by Miloš Petrović - @MilosPetrovic
„LIVE: #DIDS2014 – Dan internet domena Srbije“ by Krsto Arsenijević - @krsto
You can find more about each of the speakers and their presentations in the site sections titled Schedule and Speakers.