Levi Strauss famous started selling his demin overalls to Gold Rush miners in 1853 - going on to establish a successful business that is still flourishing today.

Like the Gold Rush miners that flocked to California in the 1800s, many people are flocking to sites like Twitter in the hope that new ways of communicating will help them to strike it lucky and monetize their web activity - but like the Gold Rush, the early signs are that the people really profiting in the Rush are the merchants who have set up shop in this new Wild West selling key tools to the prospectors.

If you've used Twitter, then you've probably seen far too many tweets and direct messages (Twitter's version of email) offering to help you get untold numbers of Twitter Followers in the shortest possible space of time.

Most people ignore these messages, but their sheer frequency and the numbers of people involved mean that one lucky Merchant has racked up sales of over $100,000 dollars since March 2009 selling Follower grabbing software to ambitious Twitterers. Which software, I hear you ask?

The domain Ad.com sold for $1.4 million at Moniker’s TRAFFIC conference in Silicon Valley. The winning bidder was Divyank Turakhia of Directi.com and CEO of Skenzo, a premium domain parking company (you can't park at Skenzo unless you get a lot of quality traffic).

There's been a lot of discussion on the various domaining blogs as to whether Ad.com was worth the $1.4million paid by Divyank, but I think that it’s a bit pointless to argue whether the domain is worth $1.4 million or not after someone has already paid that for it - the question is more, was the domain good value for the price paid? Domains, like anything, are worth what someone is willing to pay for them - so if Div wants to pay $1.4m, then that’s what it’s worth to him. What is true though, is that with a brand like Ad.com, Skenzo have the potential to go mainstream into the online advertising world, and who could put a price on that?

Some of the biggest, most pervasive myths in the domaining industry are centered on type in traffic (ie the traffic that parked domain names get) - but in my opinion to really make a success of domaining you need to fully understand just how tenuous the relationship is between type in traffic and a domain's real value.

Now what I'm going to say here might annoy one of two people, but everyone's entitled to there opinion aren't they?

In this article I'm going to look at Myth Number 1 - which is probably the biggest myth of all. "Type in traffic is the most valuable, purest traffic of all". I think that this is one of the most misleading statements made about domain names. But why I hear you ask?

Using Twitter is a much more rewarding (and manageable) experience via Tweetdeck - but you can save yourself problems by making a few tweaks if you're a heavy user - and lets face it, Twitter is pretty damned addictive!

Firstly - Twitter.com the website only allows 3rd party applications (or APIs) to access it's data 100 times per hour - got that? To make it easier, for this article I'll refer to the 100 API calls as 100 points. So you have only got 100 points per hour in Tweetdeck.

If, like me you work with domains every day - or if you're just plain interested in domains - then you've got to be intrigued by this

Do you know what the first registered domain was - or when it was registered?

Like many domainers I keep an eye on Namejet, as they do get some amazing domains there (I bought Lets.com there myself last year), but they do sometimes list domains that aren't exactly what you'd describe as "expiring" names..

The latest example is Toxic.com - which anyone would agree is a great name, but surely Namejet only sell expiring and pre-release domains? Apparently not.