.TEL registry Telnic is taking its "Tell The World" motto at face value and launching into a campaign to inform the general public about a new suffix based on technology that's difficult for non domain experts to understand.

Expect to hear a lot about .TEL in the next few days. Registry Telnic has been promoting the suffix at San Diego's Demo conference this week. The result is a string of news stories in papers like the Financial Times.

I really like the concept of a unique identifier behind .TEL and the clever way in which it takes an existing system – in this case the DNS – and gives it a new twist. But I have to admit that the benefits of .TEL aren't easy to explain to non-domain experts.

So Telnic are right to get the general media to explain it for them. Outside of our closed world of domain name professionals, people tend to talk normally instead of slipping a juicy bit of jargon like "zonefile" in every other sentence. That can only help everyday Internet users who don't care about what makes .TEL work and just want to get the best out of a good product.