A standardized speed test for OpenDNS would be difficult since physical locations, ISPs and other setup factors vary. That’s why we value independent speed testing of OpenDNS so much.

Mayank Sharma of Newsforge, the online newspaper for Linux and open source, did some testing of his own - in India - and found that OpenDNS loads pages “much more quickly” than his ISP.

I tested that claim from my home base in India. After switching to OpenDNS, content-laden Web sites like news.com, cnn.com, bbcworld.com, and myspace.com loaded a lot more quickly, ping times were considerably lower, and query response times (measured with dig -x site ) to news.com, lxer.com, osnews.com, distrowatch.org, and bbcworld.com were lower by 10 to 25% compared to times when I was using my ISP’s DNS.

That shoots holes in the idea that OpenDNS is only faster if you’re in the U.S. or U.K.

Since we launched last year, many of you have asked us to provide official graphics (banners, icons, and buttons) to display on your own sites as a way to promote and endorse OpenDNS. We’re lucky to have such enthusiastic fans, but until now, we’ve only offered a small logo.

We can do better than that.

Today we’re offering a new image that’s much more interesting — not only visually, but also because it has two states: one for OpenDNS users, and one for everyone else.

Check out http://www.opendns.com/buttons/ to grab the HTML snippet for your site.

In the coming months, we’ll be adding more graphics to help you spread the word about OpenDNS. Stay tuned!

OpenDNS’s typo correction feature helps smooth one of the Internet’s daily annoyances. But for URIBLs (a kind of blacklist used by mail servers), typo correction has always been a deal breaker.

No longer!

Back in August 2006, we enhanced our nameserver software to stop doing typo correction for DNSBLs. Now, URIBLs can get the same special treatment. In fact, the popular URIBLs hosted at these three domains already do:

• surbl.org
• uribl.com
• uribl.org

If you previously disabled typo correction so you could use one of these URIBLs, you can now re-enable it.

And if you run a URIBL and would like us to add your domain to our URIBL list, please provide us with details either in the comments here or via our contact form. We’ll keep the latest list in our knowledge base.

By the way, our thanks go to the folks at SURBL and URIBL.COM for their assistance with this project.

Ok. Maybe not everyone, yet. But check out our newly added success stories and see the wide array of businesses who’ve turned us on.

There’s Duarte Design, a Mountain View, CA-based creative agency that has testimonials from a past U.S. Vice President and Citrix CEO Mark Templeton on its website. Allison S.p.A., a high-fashion eyewear company in Italy, also uses OpenDNS.

You think I could leverage my name to get some free sunglasses?

If you noticed some changes to the Web site today, thanks for paying attention.

We’ve talked about how people use OpenDNS at home, but lots of people use OpenDNS at work too. We wanted to create a place on the site to talk about them and show people how great OpenDNS is for office networks. Thanks to Tim, Dean, Fred, Nils, Michael and Chris for being the first to stand up and tell their stories.

If you’re using OpenDNS at home, set us up at work. If you don’t control your office network, tell the person who does that you want OpenDNS.