All of this week's stories are written around a single theme: typosquatting. Five days, five stories about a practice you may have thought had disappeared years ago. To paraphrase Ira Glass, this week's Name Brief is in five acts.

Act One: How to generate your own typo. (Click "Read More" for the rest.)

Name Intelligence. No one makes more imaginative, and amazingly useful, tools than Jay Westerdal at Name Intelligence. Name Intelligence has a deep database of registration data for all of the gTLDs, and the company builds tools to crunch that registration data, available through domaintools.com, in very interesting ways.

The tool I've been playing around with lately is Domain Typo. Enter a name into the search box, and Name Intelligence's Domain Typo tool will reveal dozens of typographical variants of the name you selected in six TLDs (.com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and .us).

The results are published in a grid, with symbols reflecting whether the site is registered or available, among other helpful information. The complete set of symbols looks like this:

So if you want to register a typographical error of Google or Yahoo, Paris Hilton or George Bush, Domain Tools shows you what's available.  

But if you think this is a tool for typosquatting, you'd be mistaken...or, at least, not 100% correct.

The Name Cloud. From time to time, I've advised Fortune 500 companies, and even a few famous people as well, about how to manage their brands and names online. One of the things I tell them is not to think about their names in terms of a single domain name but to think about a "name cloud" surrounding their brand or name.

What's a "name cloud"? Until I saw this Domain Typo tool, I had to explain the "name cloud" in terms of the different TLDs and the common variants of the client's name in the different TLDs. It was an understandable explanation but it took a lot of words. The Domain Typo tool, on the other hand, shows the domain cloud graphically and immediately. Here are the top five results in the "name cloud" for George Bush:

The chart shows only 5 of the 202 variants of George Bush provided by Name Intelligence. 

It's a very graphical and immediately understandable view of a name cloud. This is helpful information...whether you want the extra names as a cloud around your own name...or around someone else's.

A nice second stage feature would be so see how many of the registered names with active web sites point to the same active web site. In other words, what percentage of the "cloud" is occupied by the registrant of the name at the center of the cloud? How many variants of 'Google' point to Google?

 Act Two Tomorrow:  Hot Epxiring Names!

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