FROM Bathurst to Beecroft and Broome, community groups will for the first time be able to set up geographic website names to help their areas.
Last year Australians bought thousands of commercial geographic internet domain names, and now 22,000 community versions - bathurst.nsw.au, for example - are available for non-profit groups.
The chairman of .au Community Domains, the former federal MP Tony Staley, said the project was a world first to help build stronger local communities. "What could be more important than the local community?" he said at the project's launch in Sydney yesterday.
Trial websites in Bathurst and Wollongong are already operating. A spokesman for the Bathurst website, Michael Clancy, said it took two years, $25,000 and countless volunteer hours to set it up. It has been running since April, has 2000 local affiliations and 10,000 hits a month.
He said local sports results were popular, as were email addresses like fredbloggs@bathurst.nsw.au.
To protect the integrity of community names, the Australian Domain Name Administrator is guarding their availability. When it released commercial geographic domain names last year there was a flood of applications for the most popular.
Those names could be leased for two years by anybody happy to pay an $825 fee.
From the money raised from those commercial geographic domain names, $1.6 million has gone towards starting the community names project.
The general manager of Community Domains, Leonie Parkinson, said each local entity had to have a membership of at least eight diverse people to prevent its hijacking by a chamber of commerce or arts committee.
At last year's commercial auction, the owner of the estate agency Ray White Double Bay, Craig Pontey, bid for 44 domain names including woollahra. com.au and elizabethbay.com.au. and won seven of them.
He said they would soon start operating as community websites sponsored by his business.
Daniel Lewis