The Board of ICANN today approved a recommendation that could see a whole range of new names introduced to the Internet's addressing system.

"The Board today accepted a recommendation from its global stakeholders that it is possible to implement many new names to the Internet, paving the way for an expansion of domain name choice and opportunity" said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN.

"The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net," said Dr Twomey. "It's a massive increase in the 'real estate' of the Internet."

Presently, users have a limited range of top level domains to choose from — names that we are all familiar with like .com, .org, .info.

This proposal allows applicants for new names to self-select their domain name so that choices are most appropriate for their customers or potentially the most marketable. It is expected that applicants will apply for targeted community strings such as (the existing) .travel for the travel industry and .cat for the Catalan community (as well as generic strings like .brandname or .yournamehere). There are already interested consortiums wanting to establish city-based top level domain, like .nyc (for New York City), .berlin and .blr(Bangalore).

"One of the most exciting prospect before us is that the expanding system is also being planned to support extensions in the languages of the world," said Peter Dengate Thrush, ICANN's Chairman. "This is going to be very important for the future of the Internet in Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia." The present system only supports 37 Roman characters.

Upon approval of the implementation plan, it is planned that applications for new names will be available in the second quarter of 2009

For searching the domain name, there are many tools available. You can go to who.is and type that domain that you are interested. It will give you information about that domain, and if it is available. If the domain is already registered, you have to select a different domain.

After selecting the domain, you have to register it in a domain registrar.There are many domain registrars available if you search the web, example: yahoo domains, 1and1, GoDaddy, Rediff domains, Indiatimes domains etc. They will charge you a registrating charge depending on the TLD(top level domain like .com, .net, .in, .org, .us etc) and the registering company.

After the website name is registered, You need to have a web hosting to make your website public. For this, you have to follow the instruction in my next article.