The fact is if you want to find an organisation you will use their ‘real’ website.
If you don’t know what their domain name is, you use a search engine.

There is absolutely no legitimate reason for the .tel domain in it’s current format, probably why some 6 months later even websites such as bbc.tel have a Pagerank of 0 in Google.

I did note that .TELs haven’t been around all that long, so this could easily explain low-or-no PageRank Toolbar scores, since Google updates the Toolbar ranking data infrequently – only every so many months. Your .TEL must have some good amount of high-PR pages linking to it or it would not achieve such rankings.

If you’re talking about http://telcamp.tel/ – I viewed it just this moment and Google Toolbar showed no PR value. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have PageRank value, but it could mean that it’s so small as to not even register as a “1″ on the logarithmic toolbar PR scale. And, it’s very easy for a page to appear in the top ten listings for a fairly uncontested keyword term.

I just now looked more extensively, and I now found a couple of .TEL domains in the upper rankings for that TLD in Google which had a PageRank value of 1 to 3. However again, the Toolbar PageRank scale is logarithmic, so achieving PR of 1-3 is not all that difficult.

From the perspective of internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO), I stand by what I wrote earlier: just as with the other lesser top-level domains, the search engines are likely to consider them less trustworthy currently. For most companies, attempting to establish rankings on an additional domain is contraindicated because it will split their link-building efforts and effectiveness. Until or if .TEL becomes more established, natural search marketing benefit is unproven.

I think the advantage of using .TEL is still unclear to me, and is therefore an indistinct marketing message overall. It may fulfill a niche need for a few individuals or companies, but it’s not at all clear to me why a “single universal personal identifier for multiple communication services” could not be their existing website.

Indeed, for a great many individuals and companies out there, it already is their existing website, and it would be superfluous to set up a .TEL presence in addition to their core site.

As you state about the hCard, you need a site, you need to pay for it, and you need a means of updating it. All of these are also dependencies for .TEL as well, so they don’t really detract from the usefulness of implementing hCard microformat on existing sites, nor are they substantially convincing arguments of further benefit that .TEL might bring with it.

I can definitely see that if .TEL becomes a more universally-accepted standard source of authoritative contact information, it could be beneficial. The problem as I see it is that it must gain a sufficient volume of marketshare before that point is reached, which requires a truly large investment of capitol, and a much clearer marketing message.

I’m pleased to hear that .TEL may incorporate microformatting in the future! It definitely makes sense if you want to facilitate machine-readable contact info.

Now, no one can call me a shill for the yellow pages industry, but I have to take exception to some of your statements about yellow pages. At least in America, the larger online yellow pages do provide businesses with a large number of optional information fields, and even free-form text fields for providing details. They’re not out of control of the companies listed — indeed, any company can claim their listings and update them as frequently as they may wish — and many companies do, even to the point of performing montly huge bulk uploads of listing info for their hundreds of chainstores. And, perhaps just as importantly, even with the concept of “yellow pages” becoming somewhat less popular, that information source still has a far larger marketshare than .TEL.

The privacy feature is the least clear selling point about .TEL. I’m by no means ignorant about privacy issues, but it’s unclear to me how .TEL helps those, and why that those of us who want to make our contact info more readily findable should simultaneously want to keep it private?

The hcard microformat is very nice, but as I said in my blog, there are major problems with it. Not in the format itself, but in the implementation. I quote:
“So let’s recap the hcard solution: you need to pay for your domain (any .com or equivalent will do) and a website, you need a means to easily update your hcard even when on the move, and you need a custom-built privacy infrastructure that you hope will be accepted.”

As for why we provide a vCard link, it’s as a convenience to mobile users who want a one-click import into their address book from the web. We are going to also add automatic semantic markup on the page itself (that is a very good suggestion), but the link will stay anyway. Not every browser can suck in semantic info directly from a web page.

Online yellow pages are very weak in the information they provide: it’s not timely at all, out of the control of the company, and good luck providing a sip number, twitter name or anything out of the ordinary.

Finally, regarding privacy, no single universal personal identifier for multiple communication services will ever function properly without complete atomic privacy. And that is why we designed privacy into the system from the start. Incidentally, there’s nothing proprietary about .tel: the specs are public, it’s fully compliant with the DNS RFCs, and you can elect to use your own privacy infrastructure as well. We only mandate implementation of our API specs for interoperability between all .tel applications.