I’d say a good, identifiable, memorable, easily-entered brand name is important. Because that’s what users are typing into the url/search box.
They can and should be the same thing.
Ghu help the business whose information has failed to make it to the top levels of Google search returns, though. I guess any search return is a good one, though, in your exceedingly narrow perspective.
For me, it isn’t Google, but Firefox that completes my URLs for me.
And TLDs are pointless. You should be able to register any string of characters once and that’s it. Why worry about example.com versus example.org versus example.net? I should be able to type “example” into the address bar and go to the one, unique site at that domain.
Your business is also named “example”? Well buy that domain from the current owner, or register “example-dining” or “example-manufacturing” instead. The current system is just confusing and prone to abuse.
Fair enough, although they need to be aware that Windows servers will disregard capitalization, whereas normal servers respect it and will not show a page if it has capitals not exactly typed in the desired url.
Speaking of camelcase; a few years back, amusingly, the creator of WordPress slipped in a patch that forcefully and permanently changed all instances of ‘wordpress’ on people’s sites to his own preference of ‘WordPress’. This seemed enormously creepy.
You can certainly try, but since DNS is inherently case-insensitive, it’s not enforceable. J. Random Intarwebuser will probably forego the shift key when they poke your URL into his intarweb browser and you’ll wind up with “powergenitalia” or “expertsexchange” or “penisland”. Or something else as gratuitously embarrasing.
And yeah, your web server may enforce case sensitivity after the connection is made, but that’ll just piss off the user who doesn’t see why case sensitivity should make a difference. Or the server won’t enforce case sensitivity, in which case (no pun intended) your efforts to StudlyCaps your URL will be completely futile.
Seriously. Camelcase is a terrible strategy for word seperation in a DNS string.
I would not even attempt to use it in code or DNS assignments - I’m referring to all written instances of the domain name. I have been a persistent proponent of moving away from cryptic usernames and lowercase everything, so when I create client materials, I will make things Fred.Rated@YourNewCompany.com wherever possible - business cards, printed promo, online lists, etc. But I’d never use capitals in URLs except for obfuscation.
Thanks for the info although I’d have to say virtually no one has answered my question.
Anyway, as I’m reading it, the reason people have almost totally failed to address my specific question ie which of the domains currently being promoted for personal use (such as the id.au and .name and .me domains) is going to win out as being the standard domain for personal use because they are all irrelevant and everthing is just going to standardise to .com, .net, org. Is that a fair summary?
Probably the way you should read it. With no enforcement mechanism to see that people only register certain types of sites to certain TLDs, new TLDs will become what they will become, and nobody has a crystal ball. If a bunch of new ones get traction, I suspect the upshot will be that the TLD will be something you have to pay attention to, rather than just playing out “.com, oh, wait, that didn’t work, try .net / .org”. There’ll be way too many of them for trial and error, and it won’t signify much.
They tried to address your type of site with the “.per” domain years ago. You see where THAT went.
ETA:
Personally, I think the opening up of TLDs to arbitrary names was a terrible idea.
Or is it that no virtual person has answered you? 
If the explosion of new TLDs coming changes much of anything, in less than perhaps ten years of evolution, I’ll be surprised. As **yabob **pointed out, none of the ‘personal diffentiation’ TLDs like .me, .per, .tel etc. has had much of an impact.
My household/personal/family domain is just a plain .co.
ETA: It’s possible something now being created could evolve into a widely-used element. But I wouldn’t put a penny bet on any one possibility. It’s wait and see.
I’m glad you restated that because that was clearer than the OP.
If anybody knew that then there would only be one and all the others would already be gone. It is exactly the same as asking “VHS or Beta” or “Blu-Ray or HDVD” before those battles were settled. Just have to wait and see what the market decides. Anything thing else is opinion and speculation.
We did answer your question: dot-com … sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in TLD TLDorum. Amen.
For Australian domains .id.au is specifically setup for individuals to use for their domain names. See the auDA http://www.auda.org.au/domains/au-domains/ for more information about Australian domains. The key difference between gTLDs and Australian 2LDs is the auDA actually sets and enforces rules (e.g. .com.au is for Australian businesses only and requires an ABN to order, as such .com.au has a high trust level among consumers, etc.).
If you want the global version, as others have said there is no standard and no rules outside of the specific cases (i.e. .edu, .gov, etc).
Camelcase is fine, as long as you check it in all lower case first.
Who cares that it’s not enforced? It’s specifically NOT enforced, by a browser or anything, because by definition, the names are case-insensitive. That’s the good thing, because on a sign you can use intercaps (camelcase) to make it way easier to read, but on a radio spot you can just say it (followed by “all one word” if you want) rather than this-hyphen-that-hyphen-theotherthing-dot-com.
Those bad examples are pretty funny, though. Don’t be one!
OK, maybe I was wrong, becauseI have to admit it took me a moment to see the humor in the following:
nycanal.com
bigalsonline.com
machome.com
I guess I’m not as big a perv as I’d like to think.
(That list was GREAT for a laugh, though – thanks!)
There’s one of the baseball teams that has a bad domain name - oh yes. The Cincinna Tireds.
With the understanding that actual operational code and DNS designations should always be lowercase, I’d go so far as to say that camelcase is essential in modern marketing and promotion unless you’re fortunate enough to have a short, coherent word for your domain name. Any URL that needs a compounded word domain name will benefit in promotion from camelcasing the name.
And that’s probably the best advice. Look at how the dns entry looks in your intended MarketCase to see if the impact is OK, but make sure you give it a really close (and dirty-minded) look at the string in all lowercase to make sure you’re not committing a domain name faux pas.
As to which new-and-improved domain scheme will win the market… the winners are already out there. I’m going to guess that Google and Facebook probably cover 90% of human-initiated “domain” lookups. Google with search (which is a pretty good implementation of context-based lookup), and Facebook with lots of embedded linkage based on harvested marketing characteristics (including what you “like”.)
Pure DNS entries will be the lookup of choice for machine-to-machine use only in the near future, I’d be willing to bet.
Well, that certainly exposes a major plot hole in Accepted (from 2006, well after the requirement in the Wikipedia cite went into effect).
The domain shit.edu was registered and hosting content almost a year before the founders of South Harmon Institute of Technology gained accreditation.