Applicants prepare web hosts and resellers for the coming namespace expansion.

The annual HostingCon conference took place in Austin last week, drawing a large contingent of domain name companies to the city.

There was a lot of talk about new top level domains and some exhibitors were at the show primarily to pitch the new domain extensions.

.Host had a large booth where it tried to get web hosting companies to pre-register .host domain names. Top Level Domain Holdings, which has 88 new TLD applications pending for itself and clients, also had a booth. eNom, LogicBoxes, and several other domain companies were spreading awareness about the coming surge in available domain extensions.

In talking to a number of applicants, I found a common theme amongst them.

First, they all think they had the best strategy for determining which strings to apply for. Some acknowledged that other companies have different goals and may have picked relative winners, while others thought they picked all the good ones themselves. That’s great, given that each applicant has put their money where their mouth is.

Second, most applicants realize the only way their TLDs will be successful in the long run is if registrants actually build sites on the domains. You saw this with Demand Media’s announcement about Designs.com last week. The Minds + Machines (Top Level Domain Holdings) booth prominently featured website builder Needly.

How these services are offered to domain registrants will largely depend on the distribution model, but new TLD backers realize that domain registrars have varying capabilities to help customers build a presence on the web.

We’ve all seen what happens when there’s an imbalance between domain speculators and end users that register a particular TLD.

For some of the niche TLDs, registries will have to be particularly careful about walking this fine line. It’s possible that user behavior will change so that people will increase direct search within certain verticals if they learn to trust the content on a top level domain. That would be a huge win for both the registry and registrants.