Creating mobile Web sites for small businesses can often be too expensive for these companies, which is why the new dotMobi top-level domain has proved a popular alternative for many of them, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. A .mobi domain is supposed to signify a site that has been formatted for cell phones, smartphones and other mobile devices. The point is to make the mobile Web easier to access and navigate for consumers.

Some, like a South Carolina bed-and-breakfast, have already benefited with increased business from their .mobi sites. The mobile Top Level Domain Ltd (mTLD), the company in charge of registration for the new domain name, estimates that 17 percent of the 475,000 dotMobi domains use their mobile sites to offer live content.

The mTLD has established best practices, style sheets, standards and development tools to make the creation of mobile sites easier for owners of .mobi domains. These include a site with how-to guides to simplify the creation of mobile content; the .mobi Site Builder for consumers and small businesses; and an analysis tool to test the mobile-readiness of any Web site: .com, .mobi or otherwise.

Last fall, dotMobi auctioned off so-called premium names, including 'Celebs,' 'cheaptickets,' 'flowers,' 'fun,' 'gossip,' 'hot,' 'laugh,' 'party,' 'stockquotes' and 'wow.' This week it put a number of additional (what it calls) "highly desired" domain names up for auction. These icnlude 'airfare,' 'areacodes,' 'cam,' 'casinos,' 'creditscore,' "directions,' "eat,' 'libre,' 'loancalculator,' 'models,' 'newmusic,' 'pics,' 'pizza,' realestate' and 'singles.'

The whole concept behind creating a .mobi domain has been met some criticism, including from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the group's director and Web inventor. They would prefer a system where a single site (.com) is built and optimized pages for mobile devices are sent only when a cell phone, for example, accesses that site. Whereas .mobi works by creating two Internets in their opinion: one for mobile devices (.mobi) and one for desktops (.com).

Pushed by the likes of Microsoft, Nokia, Vodafone and Samsung Electronics, .mobi won approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) back in July 2005. Nokia first proposed a domain extension for mobile devices back in 2000, but ICANN rejected it because of the lack of technical details in the application. Nokia persevered, however, garnering industry support, before re-submitting it as .mobi in March 2004.

According to market research firm M:Metrics, not one dotMobi site is among the top 50 sites accessed by wireless devices.