If you try to play our podcast right now, you can't. It's there, hosted on our server, files all snug in their directory, yet completely inaccessible. The same is true of podcasts around the world--not all of them--but a lot of them.Why? Podtrac is down.Podtrac.com is a service used by many podcasters for measuring podcast downloads, so we know how many people listened to what episode, when, and from what countries, so while our files are all hosted on our server, when you download or listen an episode of our podcast, it redirects through podtrac first.But if you go to any podtrac link right now, you'll see this message: "Notice: This domain name expired on 06/02/07 and is pending renewal or deletion" along with a parked page. They (presumably) accidentally forgot to renew the domain. They likely know about it now and have probably paid to renew it, but it can take a day or so for everything to go back to normal.And clearly, they didn't just let it expire. They'd be fools to do so. For one, there's been no indication that the business is suffering. But more importantly, if they did decide to go out of business, they'd be better off selling the domain name at an auction. If they don't, some cybersquatter will. In fact, I'd love to see how much money GoDaddy.com is making from all the squatters who have paid to reserve the name. It's likely in the thousands.So besides an interesting peek at a corporate mix-up, what does this mean for families, besides many of your favorite podcasts being temporarily unavailable? It's a good reminder to keep your domain information up to date.Many families have family websites with blogs and photos of the latest dance recital or baseball game. My mother has a site for a small business she's started up on the side, and in my mother's case, a year ago, we didn't have our whois information up to date. The e-mail address listed pointed to a domain we were no longer using, so we never got notification that it was expiring until it was too late. A squatter had picked it up, and we had to pay a $100 ransom fee to get it back. And frankly, $100 was cheap. That the site has little traffic and is not the core of the business reduced its value--we told the squatter that we'd like the domain back, but we'd already registered the .net equivalent and could just switch to that if he didn't take our final offer.Most registrars have auto-renew settings so it'll just bill your credit card each year when it's time to renew. (I know GoDaddy, podtrac's registrar, has this, because we register ours through GoDaddy as well.) So take precautions. Like backing up your hard drive and plugging in a surge protector, this is just one more thing that we need to remember in a digital age.