Run Your Own EDU Blog – “PI.edu is now offering sub-domain blogs that will allow you to educate your potential customers on your field of expertise. Why PI.edu? Our blogs allow you to reach an education minded audience that is difficult to reach with mass market blogs such as Blogger or Blogspot.”

All that for for the low price of $50.00 a month! Now they do say they will have some sort of “restrictions,” but that statement above pretty much says have a splog site here. Now I’ve seen some accidental splogs under .EDU, and I’ve seen some questionable .EDU domains. Since everyone watched the slow demise of .ORG it doesn’t surprise me that the venerable, restricted .EDU would start getting chipped at.

Okay, but it could be very bad considering that EDUCAUSE Amendment (6) part 1 – subpart 4 (PDF) says something like:

“No name registered in .EDU domain may be intentionally deployed to identify any organization other than the Registrant itself…”

BUT it continues on to say

“… while ANYNAME.REGISTRANT.EDU has no such limitation.”

Also check out the EDUCASE policy itself.

I couldn’t find anything to counter the possiblity that this could become a splog gateway into the .EDU namespace. I do know from that messages passed through UDWEB that EDUCUASE is already getting calls about it.

Ouch.

[Update] Shut down blogs.pi.edu by ZDNet‘s Christopher Dawson — A newly-launched site called blogs.pi.edu is happy to sell you your own blog with a .edu domain for the low low price of $50. LinkAdage is partnering with the Pickering Institute to sell canonical domain names using the valid pi.edu domain, lending the credibility of a .edu domain to such sites as handbags.pi.edu and [...]

[Update] A good original source of this story – LinkAdage Selling .EDU Blog Space: It’s Evil by Ian Lurie