Over the years, a constant source of fun and teasing for me has been the type of domain names that Bulgarian companies and organisations have a tendency to use.

More often than not, those domains would end in -bg.com or -bulgaria.com instead of simply with .bg, making little or no sense. All the chauvinism and national pride that Bulgarians tend to possess did not extend to the online world. Domain names ending in the international commercial .com, or even the .org and .net domains, were more popular than the country's own .bg.

For years on end, one of Bulgaria's most well-known showmen, who would probably take accusations of being a nationalist as a compliment and who doesn't speak a word of English, would close his late-night show on the commercial station bTV by announcing the address of his website, pronounced as "dobbal-ou dobbal-ou dobbal-ou tochka slavishow tochka kom".

Even the regional broadcasts of the AXN television network, for example, would list in their programming commercials the web addresses for AXN's stations in the region as www.axn.hu/, www.axn.cz/ and www.axn-bulgaria.com/.

Likewise, the website of Bulgaria's Arsenal weapons factory can be found at arsenal-bg.com and the Bulgarian Industrial Association (BIA) uses bia-bg.com.

The Bulgarian Culture Ministry and the Institute of Folklore at the Bulgaria Academy of Sciences (BAN) jointly run a website dedicated to Bulgarian cultural heritage, using the domain name treasures-bulgaria.com, while The Red House Centre for Culture and Debate in Sofia uses redhouse-sofia.org.

The simple cause of this habit has been the fact that only one organisation has been licensed to register .bg domain names, namely register.bg, whose terms and conditions that ruled these registrations included the requirement to "have grounds to register the name". Such "grounds" could include being the owner of a company with that name or owning the patent registration for the particular name.

The paperwork involved was, even by Bulgarian administration standards, off-putting and included dealing with administrative organisations ranging from the courts, to the patent office, to the registration agency, none of which is famous for efficiency or speed. As a result, the de-facto standard that evolved was to register as -bg.com or -bg.org or something similar.

Was, because all that changed during the week of August 25, when register.bg announced a change in its terms and conditions, dropping the requirement that one had to have "grounds to register the name", the company announced.

Even though the domain name .bg does not offer much in the way of opportunities for domain name hacking (compare the registration of domain names like del.icio.us or cr.yp.to, which spell "delicious" or "crypto", respectively), the change did lead to an overloaded server at register.bg for several days, presumably because of the amount of registration requests caused by a slight "land grab". With a little luck, we'll soon see domain names like slavishow.bg and axn.bg, although some names might want to wait for the introduction of urls in the Cyrillic alphabet, as sblusuk.bg still makes little or no sense to those who do not known Bulgarian.

Looking slightly further ahead, this small administrative change might be the beginning of a situation in which thinking about domain registration in Bulgaria goes from "avoiding administrative hassle" and "what's cheaper", to "what is easy to remember for our users" and "what makes sense in terms of marketing".